Darth Egregious's questions

I was just running some DL code in a jupyter notebook and watching a youtube video in another tab. I heard the GPU fan turn off, but I saw an error about an IO issue. I did some poking around. When I try to touch a file in my /home, I get:

cat: .bash_profile: Input/output error

I checked dmesg and it doesn't look good.

[ 6187.973458] EXT4-fs warning (device sdc5): dx_probe:744: inode #10485761: lblock 0: comm gnome-shell: error -5 reading directory block
[ 6188.018594] blk_partition_remap: fail for partition 5
[ 6188.018620] blk_partition_remap: fail for partition 5
[ 6189.798280] EXT4-fs warning (device sdc5): dx_probe:744: inode #10485761: lblock 0: comm dmesg: error -5 reading directory block

I'm pretty sure that this means that my drive is finished.

What can I save from my RAM etc., so that I won't have to recreate everything when I set up a new drive? Anything that I can save from my /home to another partition would make me happy. I haven't rebooted yet.

I recently installed 12.04, but I had the same problem in 11.10. When I watch a video, VLC suppresses the monitor being turned off. In older (pre-Unity) Ubuntu versions, this would only be in effect while the video was playing. Now VLC is disabling the turning off of the monitor regardless of if it is playing or not.

Is there a way to fix this? Or a less quirky shell? Or a video player that doesn't exhibit this behaviour?

So I have an awesome configuration on my home pc. My /home directory has its own partition.

My home partition slowly fills up until the system is unable to complete even simple tasks. For example, when this issue has occured, I can load up firefox. It just pops up an error message saying that it cannot be done.

Rebooting solves the issue.

The strange thing is, I've run baobab and it doesn't notice a problem. There should be hundreds of gigabytes of data somewhere, but it doesn't see it.

Does anyone have any idea of how I might troubleshoot this issue? I'm thinking I could do lsof but I've always found the output of that to be too much information.

Maybe my drive is, like, dying.

Edit: is there a /home analog of /var that gets cleared out at boot time? Maybe I could check in there next time I notice this problem to see if I can divine what's up.

Update: I found the issue. my .xsession-errors file is filling up with

Authentication deferred - ignoring client message

Is there a way I can see what is causing this error and fix it?

I've tried a fair number of media center apps like Boxee or XBMC. They all seem to use their own UI. Is there one that uses the native UI, more like rhythmbox or banshee?

I'm looking for something that has the library features of one of the more fully featured media centers I've listed. E.g. features like getting actor and director names, and linking to other media in the collection that shares these attributes.

E.g. If I have The Birds in my collection I could click on Alfred Hitchcock and see Rear Window or whatever.

Sometimes when I scroll in firefox, I will a block of the same content from another portion of the page rendered where it shouldn't be, almost like the browser didn't scroll properly.

I suspect that this has something to do with my video driver, and some stability issues I've been experiencing. I'm using the recommended driver, 280.13.

I think it would be great it I could control the sound balance by placing a window in different places on my desktop. For example, I could put a youtube video playing on the left-hand side, and hear it out of the left speaker. Simultaneously, I could be playing a game on the right-hand side that I'd hear through the right speaker. Is there anything I can do to get this behaviour?