dunderhead's questions

I get daily crashes with Firefox on Ubuntu. Almost every time I start Ubuntu and then try to launch Firefox, it causes X to crash out immediately. Sometimes I have to log in three or four times before Firefox actually loads. These crashes are obviously causing me to lose any work I haven't saved in other apps. As you can imagine, that is a tad frustrating.

I suspect the crashes might be something to do with the Flash side of things because sometimes when I try to visit a website with Flash content such as bbc iplayer, the dreaded black screen of death appears instantly.

I know that Ubuntu makes modifications to Mozilla's version of Firefox, so I wondered if I could try running a plain Mozilla version of Firefox without modifications to see if that would work. Could anyone tell me how to achieve this?

What is telepathy-indicator? And what does it do? All I can find is that it's a "Desktop service to integrate Telepathy with the messaging menu" which, I'm afraid, means nothing to me. Can I remove it safely?

I'm having major problems with Ubuntu crashing every day so I'd like to try something different. I tried Googling for a list of packages in Oneiric Ubuntu Minimal but couldn't find anything.

I'd like to try a system that doesn't have Zeitgeist installed, but as it seems to be so tightly integrated into Ubuntu I wondered if it was still present in the Minimal version.

Ubuntu Software Center is very slow here.Seriously, Windows virtual machines run faster that that here!

I dislike Software Center so I installed Synaptic ages ago, and that loads in 2 seconds! Perfect. Well almost - I can't seem to open downloaded .debs with it. Can I change things so that Synaptic opens .debs by default?

Is it possible to remove Software Center completely and replace it with Synaptic?

I'm getting regular errors in my syslog (they're occurring exactly every 10 minutes, to the second):

Feb 22 13:01:24 computer sm-mta[5747]: q1MBVO6B003778: SYSERR(root): hash map "Alias0": missing map file /etc/mail/aliases.db: No such file or directory

I don't know how to interpret these errors, but am I right in guessing that the sm-mta[5747]   part of of the error is the application name and process ID? If so, this would seem odd to me as I do not have sm-mta installed and System Monitor does not have a process ID with that number. I'm probably being stupid as usual!

How can I find out what's causing these errors and stop them from occuring, please?

In Nautilus I tried to rename a .desktop file, but Unity (or is it Gnome? I suspect it's Unity but please correct me if I'm wrong) then renamed the file to end with .desktop.desktop - not what I wanted. After a bit of messing around I guessed that Unity was automatically adding a file extension and managed to rename it so it ended with only one .desktop

How can I turn off automatic file extension renaming? Or is this the only filetype which has this annoying behaviour? In which case I can live with it.  (But I'll be tutting a lot.   ;-)

I'm used to renaming files, so unexpected behaviour in both Nautilus and Thunar is annoying and gets in the way of my completing simple tasks. Thunar is even worse - it doesn't show the file extension at all!

I never use Recently Used file lists; I have a filing system so I know where I want to open and save files.

I've read this question:

Can I stop apps from selecting "Recently Used" by default in file chooser dialogs?

However, I just want this option completely removed.

It's an annoyance to have to keep navigating away from the default.

Failing the above is there a way to make my home directory the default?

How can I prevent Banshee from remembering what files I have played? I really hate the way it keeps surprising me by automatically playing, after the current track, the previous file it had played. I really HATE that. I was just listening to a beautiful piece of music and in a nice mood when Banshee, without asking me, immediately afterwards, started playing a really annoying answerphone message from earlier.

My solution so far is to manually delete all files in the playlist, but obviously that's not a long term solution. I cannot find an option anywhere that says "Do not remember my history"

(Did I mention I hate the way Banshee plays my files without asking me?)

Every time I add a PPA I cannot see the package I'm trying to install. I suppose I must be doing something wrong! So here's my latest effort:

In a Terminal I typed:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jeromerobert/misc

and that seemed to work correctly

Then I typed:

sudo apt-get update

But when I go to Synaptic or Software Center the application I want to install is not there. Could someone please tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Other disk analyzers are far inferior as they don't allow you to delete files from their interface. The to-ing and fro-ing back and forth between Nautilus and Disk Usage Analyzer is slow, tedious and silly, especially as there is a Linux program that actually does the job properly.

I cannot find kdirstat in Ubuntu Software Center.

When I select 'Shut Down...' from the menu, Ubuntu shuts down but, right at the end of the shutdown, there's a very nasty Click! from the hard disk drive. This is a sound I know very well from experience. I'm concerned that if Ubuntu keeps doing this it will eventually break the hard drive. The drive is a Seagate ST31000524AS 1TB, and this is a quite new desktop computer. Is there something I can do to make Ubuntu shut the drive down more gently?

On my Windows machine with just one click I can launch favourite or bookmarked files that I use on a daily basis, which is a great time-saver. Is there any way to do this with 11.10 Unity? Ideally I would like to right-click on an icon in the launcher and have a list of files appear that I could then left-click to launch, but I'd be happy for any simple solution.

Please note that I am not referring to recently used files lists - these do not work at all because the bookmarked file will always drop off the bottom of any recently used file list.

On my Windows machine I press Winkey + C and a calculator pops up. I find this very useful - is there any way to achieve this in Ubuntu?

In an earlier version of Ubuntu with Compiz I'm pretty sure there was a useful setting to enable seeing what's behind the current window by clicking and holding the title bar, which then changed the current window's opacity to something like 10 percent.

Is there any way to achieve this in Ubuntu 11.10?