Barton Chittenden's questions

After upgrading from xubuntu 18.04 to 20.04, I'm getting the following warning message popping up when I try to paste into a terminal:

I'm and experienced user. I do understand the implications of pasting arbitrary text from a web page into the terminal, including the possibility of the page injecting invisible text into the clipboard. When I'm pasting text from a web page, I explicitly paste it into a text editor. Every time. I understand why this message exists, and why it shouldn't be easy to disable, but I do take my own precautions, and I don't want this message.

How do I get rid of it?

I'm running xubuntu 18.04. I recently switched from a triple-monitor setup to single monitor -- and now the xfce panel and the whisker menu don't show up on the desktop. I can seexfce4-panel in the process list, I just think that it's displaying on a screen that doesn't exist. Not sure how to fix this, since I can't click on the panel to unlock and re-position it.

I've started using scrot for screenshots; this works beautifully, but occasionally I need to edit screenshots to

• blur personal information
• add text
• add arrows
• add a box around something

I'm looking for a lightweight bitmap editor that will launch quickly from the command line (so that I can use it with scrot --exec), and will allow me to add blurring, text, arrows and boxes with a minimal number of keystrokes, mousing. Ideally, I'd like a keyboard shortcut, then select area for any given action.

Does anyone know of such a beast?

Edit: I don't consider Gimp to be lightweight: it launches slowly, drawing shapes involves a two step process -- select area / stroke selection -- the second of which doesn't seem to have a shortcut key... I'm looking for a tool that I can use to make edits in a couple of seconds, and save.

I'm running Xubuntu 14.04 on a laptop with 1920x1024 native resolution. After the latest automatic update (including kernel upgrade to 3.13.0-92-generic), the maximum available screen resolution dropped to 1024x768.

$ xrandr
xrandr: Failed to get size of gamma for output default
Screen 0: minimum 1024 x 768, current 1024 x 768, maximum 1024 x 768
default connected 1024x768+0+0 0mm x 0mm
   1024x768       76.0* 

I'm using nvidia-352 driver; lspci shows

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107M [GeForce GTX 660M] (rev a1)

Following https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/Resolution#Problem:__Wrong_resolutions.2C_refresh_rates.2C_or_monitor_specs , I looked at /var/log/Xorg.0.log, which shows:

[    49.227] (EE) NVIDIA: Failed to initialize the NVIDIA kernel module. Please see the
[    49.227] (EE) NVIDIA:     system's kernel log for additional error messages and
[    49.227] (EE) NVIDIA:     consult the NVIDIA README for details.
[    49.227] (EE) [drm] KMS not enabled
[    49.227] (EE) open /dev/dri/card0: No such file or directory
[    49.227] (WW) Falling back to old probe method for modesetting
[    49.227] (EE) open /dev/dri/card0: No such file or directory

The kernel log is 0 bytes. Not sure what that's about.

sudo get-edid|parse-edid crashed, but before it did, it gave me

This is read-edid version 3.0.1. Prepare for some fun.
Attempting to use i2c interface
Looks like no busses have an EDID. Sorry!
Attempting to use the classical VBE interface

    Performing real mode VBE call
    Interrupt 0x10 ax=0x4f00 bx=0x0 cx=0x0
Partial Read... Try again

[edit] according to @mikewhatever, Kernel 3.13.0-92-generic is still in the proposed repository. Indeed:

$ apt-cache policy linux-image-3.13.0-92-generic
linux-image-3.13.0-92-generic:
  Installed: 3.13.0-92.139
  Candidate: 3.13.0-92.139
  Version table:
  *** 3.13.0-92.139 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-proposed/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

linux-image-3.13.0-91-generic isn't installed. Rebooting into 3.13.0-89-generic did not fix the issue.

EDIT:

The Kernel upgrade turned out not to be the issue -- the problem was an upgrade to secure-boot, which disabled the drivers.

At work, I tend to have multiple instances of firefox open at once -- one for outlook web app, one for jira, another one or two for some in-house web apps... on top of this, I will often have a few terminals (tmux helps keep this to a minimum). I am very habituated to use alt-tab to switch between applications.

The problem that I have is that when I'm switching using alt-tab, all instances of firefox use the firefox icon, so I can't tell at a glance which firefox I'm switching to... yes, there's some text there, but I don't want to stop and read while I'm flipping through icons. Is there a way for alt-tab to display the favicon (the icon that shows to the left of the URL in a web browser) of the page rather than the firefox icon?

I'm interested in using my laptop trackpad as a drawing tablet, i.e. using absolute rather than relative coordinates, similar to Inklet for OSX.

The same question was asked in ubuntuforums.org in May 2010, but the question was never answered. I'm wondering if this has been done on Linux. I'm also trying to figure out which search terms to use. I searched for 'linux laptop touchpad absolute mode', and came up with an issue with track pad drivers which put the trackpad in absolute mode. but I'm really looking for a program which uses the absolute positions rather than a driver setting.

The Toshiba Satellite A-305 S6916 laptop has six semi-touch buttons above the keyboard. The 'buttons' are capacitative touch areas which toggle on and off. They are back-lit when on, dark when off.

The buttons are audio controls -- mute, media, play, stop, back and next. When I touch the 'mute' button to disable it, it goes off for about half a second, then comes back on.

There is also a volume dial on the front of the laptop. When I scroll the dial, I see the software volume slider supposedly moving the volume up and down, but I get no sound.

If I start Rhythmbox and change the volume using the slider on the front of the laptop, Rhythmbox locks up.

I've hard booted the laptop; that didn't help.

I've had the laptop for a couple of years, and I've never had trouble with the sound before. I'm not exactly sure when the problem started, I don't do a whole lot that involves audio.

┌───────────────────────────── AlsaMixer v1.0.22 ──────────────────────────────┐
│ Card: HDA Intel                                      F1:  Help               │
│ Chip: Realtek ALC268                                 F2:  System information │
│ View: F3:[Playback] F4: Capture  F5: All             F6:  Select sound card  │
│ Item: Master [dB gain: 0.00]                         Esc: Exit               │
│                                                                              │
│     ┌──┐     ┌──┐     ┌──┐     ┌──┐     ┌──┐     ┌──┐                        │
│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │  │     │▒▒│     │  │                        │
│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │  │     │▒▒│     │  │                        │
│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │  │     │▒▒│     │  │                        >
│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │  │     │▒▒│     │  │                        >
│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │  │     │▒▒│     │  │                        >
│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │  │     │▒▒│     │  │                        >
│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │  │     │▒▒│     │  │                        >
│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │  │     │▒▒│     │  │                        >
│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │  │     │▒▒│     │  │                        >
│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │  │     │▒▒│     │  │                        │
│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │  │     │▒▒│     │  │                        │
│     ├──┤     ├──┤     ├──┤     └──┘     └──┘     └──┘     ┌──┐     ┌──┐      │
│     │MM│     │MM│     │MM│                                │OO│     │OO│      │
│     └──┘     └──┘     └──┘                                └──┘     └──┘      │
│     100    100<>100 100<>100   0<>0   100<>100   0<>0                        │
│  < Master >Headphon Speaker    PCM    Front Mi Mic Boos  S/PDIF  S/PDIF D    │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

I turned up the Master and Speaker volume in alsamixer, but that didn't help... the mute button is still enabled.

I also verified that the youtube video that I was watching actually did have audio ;-)

This issue is similar to https://askubuntu.com/questions/119678/sound-muted-in-milliseconds-after-unmute, although I can't even hear 100ms worth of sound, even when I do hit the unmute button. I do see the light turn off and on again though.

I also tried plugging in earphones; that didn't help.

I was trying to find out information about pmap this morning, and ran man pmap... the man page gives me the options for launching pmap, but tells me nothing about how to interpret what I see on the screen when I've run the program. I would like to report this as a bug in Launchpad, but I want to know if this has been fixed in a newer version of Ubuntu.

I'm running 10.04. Here's what I get:

NAME
       pmap - report memory map of a process

SYNOPSIS
       pmap [-x|-d] [-q] pid  ...
       pmap -V

DESCRIPTION 
       The pmap command reports the memory map of a process or processes.

GENERAL OPTIONS        
       -x   extended       Show the extended format.
       -d   device         Show the device format.
       -q   quiet          Do not display some header/footer lines.
       -V   show version   Displays version of program.

SEE ALSO
       ps(1), pgrep(1)

STANDARDS
       No  standards apply, but pmap looks an awful lot like a SunOS com‐
       mand.

AUTHOR
       Albert Cahalan <[email protected]> wrote pmap in  2002,  and  is
       the  current  maintainer of the procps collection. Please send bug
       reports to <[email protected]>.

Linux                        October 26, 2002                     PMAP(1)

Can someone run this on a more modern Ubuntu, and see if the man pages have been updated in the last couple of years? (I'm guessing not... the previous revision was in 2002, but I still like to cover my bases)

I installed xmonad a couple of nights ago. Xmonad includes the files that you would need select it from GDM (e.g. /usr/share/applications/xmonad.desktop and /usr/share/xsessions/xmonad.desktop).

I tried starting xmonad via gdm and locked up X... (eventually even the virtual terminals locked up and I had to reboot the machine). The next time I started the machine I selected gnome instead of xmonad, it launched gnome-session, but tried to run xmonad instead of metacity as the desktop environment (this was entirely unusable). I moved the xmonad.desktop files in both /usr/share/applications and /usr/share/xsessions, now I have no desktop environment (which is slightly usable). How do I re-enable metacity?