Kryten's questions

There are a number of questions regarding the "Launch using dedicated graphics card" option in Ubuntu: this one, this one, or this one, for example. But none of them are asking the question I really want to know.

I want to understand what this option does, especially in the context of my system: the motherboard has integrated Intel graphics and an Nvidia Graphics card. I have three monitors attached to the ports on the Nvidia card and nothing attached to the onboard graphics.

When I see "Launch using dedicated graphics card", I imagine something like this: the desktop is running on (using the hardware of and being rendered in the memory of) the integrated graphics and the contents of this window I've just opened with this option are running on the other graphics card and somehow the output is piped through the integrated graphics (kind of like "picture-in-picture"?).

But given that I'm not using the onboard graphics at all, aren't my applications already running on the dedicated graphics card?

I suspect that my understanding of this option is wrong. Can anyone clarify what this option does?

I backed up my home directory from Ubuntu 14.04, installed Ubuntu 18.04 on a new PC, then restored my home directory.

I went ahead and installed the native app following these instructions. Now I'm trying to remove the Chrome web app and I can't figure out how to uninstall it.

Both the Chrome app and the native app are showing up in my launcher - in fact, the Chrome app has an icon and the native app is missing its icon. But the Chrome app is not in Chrome's chrome://extensions page, so there's no option to uninstall.

I've searched my home directory for references to Postman (find ~ -iname "*postman*") and moved my ~/.config/Postman directory. This did remove my Postman history but did not remove the Postman Chrome app (not that I really expected it to).

How can I completely remove the Postman web app?

Edit

I fixed the missing icon image; the directions I followed had the wrong path for the icon image. The good news is that the old icon and the new have slightly different colouring, so I can tell them apart. But I'd still prefer to just have one.

I have recently switched from Ubuntu 14.04 to Kubuntu 14.04 and there's one thing that's bugging me...

I have two (identical) monitors and I use multiple workspaces extensively. My workspaces are arranged in two columns of four workspaces, like this:

+--------+--------+
|   #1   |   #2   |
+--------+--------+
|   #3   |   #4   |
+--------+--------+
|   #5   |   #6   |
+--------+--------+
|   #7   |   #8   |
+--------+--------+

When I used Ubuntu and I pressed the workspace grid hotkey (META+S), my monitors would be laid out like this (sorry for the big complicated ASCII diagrams):

+================Left Monitor================+  +===============Right Monitor================+
|                                            |  |                                            |
|   +--------+--------+ +--------+--------+  |  |   +--------+--------+ +--------+--------+  |
|   |  #1 L  |  #1 R  | |  #2 L  |  #2 R  |  |  |   |  #1 L  |  #1 R  | |  #2 L  |  #2 R  |  |
|   +--------+--------+ +--------+--------+  |  |   +--------+--------+ +--------+--------+  |
|   |  #3 L  |  #3 R  | |  #4 L  |  #4 R  |  |  |   |  #3 L  |  #3 R  | |  #4 L  |  #4 R  |  |
|   +--------+--------+ +--------+--------+  |  |   +--------+--------+ +--------+--------+  |
|   |  #5 L  |  #5 R  | |  #6 L  |  #6 R  |  |  |   |  #5 L  |  #5 R  | |  #6 L  |  #6 R  |  |
|   +--------+--------+ +--------+--------+  |  |   +--------+--------+ +--------+--------+  |
|   |  #7 L  |  #7 R  | |  #8 L  |  #8 R  |  |  |   |  #7 L  |  #7 R  | |  #8 L  |  #8 R  |  |
|   +--------+--------+ +--------+--------+  |  |   +--------+--------+ +--------+--------+  |
|                                            |  |                                            |
+============================================+  +============================================+

I could then drag windows from one workspace/monitor to another easily - the workspaces & monitors are laid out in a logical arrangement.

But in Kubuntu, the layout is different:

+======Left Monitor======+  +=====Right Monitor======+
|                        |  |                        |
|   +--------+--------+  |  |   +--------+--------+  |
|   |  #1 L  |  #2 L  |  |  |   |  #1 R  |  #2 R  |  |
|   +--------+--------+  |  |   +--------+--------+  |
|   |  #3 L  |  #4 L  |  |  |   |  #3 R  |  #4 R  |  |
|   +--------+--------+  |  |   +--------+--------+  |
|   |  #5 L  |  #6 L  |  |  |   |  #5 R  |  #6 R  |  |
|   +--------+--------+  |  |   +--------+--------+  |
|   |  #7 L  |  #8 L  |  |  |   |  #7 R  |  #8 R  |  |
|   +--------+--------+  |  |   +--------+--------+  |
|                        |  |                        |
+========================+  +========================+

Also logical, I guess, but it forces me to stop and think carefully about where I'm dragging a window in a way that I didn't have to under Unity. For example, if I want to drag a window from #3L (left monitor, #3 workspace) to #2R (right monitor, #2 workspace), I have to stop and think about exactly which workspace on the right monitor it needs to be dropped on.

Is there a way to reorganize the desktop grid under KDE to match that under Unity?

I've just moved from Ubuntu to Kubuntu and I have a small script written in Python that used to display a brief status indicator message (how long a service on our network has been up) on my screen using appindicator.

I'm revising the script for the KDE environment. It runs and I can see my icon but I can't get it to display the time next to the icon on my screen. My reading suggests that KDE does not support labels next to notification icons, but I can't find any definitive documentation on this subject. Specifically, I found some documentation somewhere (can't find it now) stating that under KDE, AppIndicator3 falls back to KStatusNotifierItem. That documentation makes no mention of labels.

But failing to find something in the docs is hardly a definitive answer to my question. So, like the subject says, does Python AppIndicator3 running under KDE support labels?

Ubuntu 14.04 desktop, 64-bit

I came in to work this morning and noticed that the clock on my system was off by approximately 3 minutes, as compared to the clock on my phone. That seems odd, since my system is on 24/7 and should be keeping the time synced with ntp.ubuntu.com, right? And I've never noticed this problem before.

In the system configuration, the "Time & Date" settings are set to set the time automatically from the internet.

So I started digging...

First I used ntpdate to update the time. This worked, but a few minutes later the time was incorrect again - by approximate -217 seconds.

Next, I installed ntpd, hoping that continuous updating would solve the problem. I reset the date using ntpdate and started the ntpd service. No luck - a few minutes later, the time was off, again by approximately -217 seconds.

The offset of -217 seconds seems pretty consistent - ie. it doesn't appear to drift once it hits that difference. This suggest to me that there's something on my system resetting the time periodically, and because the change is too large, ntpd will not adjust it.

After some more experimenting, I have determined that whatever is resetting my clock is doing it approximately every 5 minutes. I've looking in my crontab and the crontab for root, as well as the system-wide cron files.

A couple of additional details:

1. I have joined by system to a Windows domain using Likewise Open.

2. There was a major change to our network over the weekend - we switched from one connection to a different (faster) connection. However, I appear to be the only one experiencing this issue (amongst about 30 Windows PCs, Ubuntu PCs, and Macs).

So, a couple of questions:

• What could be doing this?
• If a scheduled job is not in my cron files, where could it be?