Running Bionic Beaver (18.04) release of Lubuntu. I've installed qsampler, but when I start it up it displays
Server is starting...
linuxsampler
Could not start server. Sorry.
Server was stopped with exit status 0.
find / -mount -iname '*linuxsampler*' doesn't yield any results.
aptitude search ~dlinuxsampler doesn't show any packages which appear to install linuxsampler.
Do I need to install another package in order to use qsampler? If so, where do I get it?
Is there an updated list of current laptops which have been found to work well under Ubuntu (other than the common "n best linux laptops of YYYY" articles)? There appears to be a page for Ubuntu-certified hardware but laptops are not among the categories of hardware listed.
I'm using hardware that requires a driver to be built which is not present in the kernel source tree, i.e. not "part of" linux. Currently I'm finding it necessary to rebuild and install the driver manually every time I start using a new kernel version. Is there a way to streamline this process?
I'm running the openbox WM and would like to avoid loading the gnome stack. One of the lingering issues I have to resolve is avoiding abrupt system crashes due to depleted battery power.
Is there a low-profile, low-dependency daemon that will handle this situation? I'd like to be able to configure it to, for example, drop the system down into hibernation at 4% battery life if the AC is not connected.
I suppose I could just write a little cron job to poll /sys/.../batt*/.. and /sys/.../ac*/... every 10 minutes or so, but it seems like there might be some edge cases that need tending.
laptop-mode-tools sounds promising:
It ... supports various ... power management features, such as ... automatically hibernating if battery levels are too low...
However, it doesn't seem to be possible to install it in Maverick without relatively dire consequences.
On my system, its installation also requires the removal of the acpi-support package, which sounds sort of ominous.
Marco Ceppi's answer to a tangentially related question set me to wondering about the destination of all the tests that users run from the LiveCD menu. There's a fairly comprehensive hardware compatibility test, at least as of 10.10, that seems geared towards accumulating a database of ubuntu-friendly models, components, and peripherals.
I must apologize for my vague description of this app; if someone knows what I am talking about and can provide the actual name of the menu item, that would be wonderful. I just recall running it from the LiveCD before installation, after which point I switched over to OpenBox from gnome and haven't looked at the menu system since.
Marco's answer mentions the laptop testing tracker, which seems like it could be a front end to this hypothetical DB. However, there are currently only a few reports on that page.
Is this something we can expect to see made available in the near future? Are collected test results available at a different page/site? It would be a tremendously beneficial resource for the community.
I'm running a fairly fresh and vanilla 10.10 install, built from scratch about a month ago on an Acer Aspire 5742 laptop. I use openbox as my window manager and run neither the KDE nor Gnome desktop stacks. I haven't yet figured out how to get the system to hibernate when low on battery power, so I get occasional power outages.
I've noticed that when my laptop switches over to battery power, my ext* partitions are remounted with the option commit=600.
When I switch back to AC, there is another set of remounts with commit=0.
This is apparent from entries in /var/log/syslog like
Mar 31 14:48:48 gatsby kernel: [414710.189306] EXT4-fs (dm-0): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,commit=600
Mar 31 14:48:48 gatsby kernel: [414710.324137] EXT4-fs (dm-1): re-mounted. Opts: commit=600
Mar 31 14:48:48 gatsby kernel: [414710.749636] EXT4-fs (dm-2): re-mounted. Opts: commit=600
Mar 31 16:35:58 gatsby kernel: [421128.882072] EXT4-fs (dm-0): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,commit=0
Mar 31 16:35:58 gatsby kernel: [421129.083283] EXT4-fs (dm-1): re-mounted. Opts: commit=0
Mar 31 16:35:59 gatsby kernel: [421129.724136] EXT4-fs (dm-2): re-mounted. Opts: commit=0
The mount manual explains the meaning of the count option with respect to the ext3 filesystem thusly:
commit=nrsec
Sync all data and metadata every nrsec seconds.
The default value is 5 seconds. Zero means default.
What does this mean, exactly? It seems to imply that writes may be cached for up to 10 minutes. Does this mean that there could be filesystem corruption, or that some changes may go unsaved if my battery power runs out?
I'd like to have a message pop up in response to various system events, mostly in order to be able to set reminders for myself from a shell session. There are a few ways to do this; zenity seems to be the most polished. However, I've found at least two problems with zenity:
Messages do not appear on all workspaces. I tried using the gtk option --screen to control this, but they just appear on the current workspace regardless. So if I am switching workspaces as the message comes up, I will not see it.
Messages do not appear above all other windows. Specifically, if I am using guake, a new zenity message will appear below the guake window and I won't be able to see it.
I tried a few other apps a while back. Both gmessage and xmessage exhibited problem 1; gmessage also exhibited problem 2. I did find that kalarm, which can be scripted from the command line, worked acceptably, but I'm trying to avoid running the KDE stack if possible, and would prefer something lightweight with zenity's versatility.
It seems that it might be possible to arrange for these problems to be resolved by setting the WM_CLASS, but I'm in a bit over my head there. It might also be possible to make modifications to the window after it launches with a script, but again I'm not sure where to look for resources on that.
As suggested by @geirha, I've looked into using notify-send (via the package libnotify-bin, which appears to be a client to notify-osd). There are numerous problems with this framework, for which I've filed a few bug reports. I'm hoping that devilspie can provide workarounds for some or all of these issues, or that there is another notification system which works more reliably.
I just did an installation from the 10.10 Desktop LiveCD, making the root volume an LVM LV.
Apparently this is not supported; I managed it by taking these steps before starting the GUI installer app:
lvm2 package on the running system/var; this I don't think is relevant.After taking these steps, the GUI installer offered the two LVs as installation targets; I gladly accepted, also putting /boot on a primary partition separate from the LVM partition.
Installation seemed to go smoothly, and I've verified that both the root and var volumes do contain acceptable-looking directory structures.
However, booting fails; if I understood correctly what happened, I was dropped into a busybox running in the initrd filesystem.
Although I haven't worked through the entirety of the grub2 docs yet, it looks like the entry that tries to boot my new system is correct:
menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.35-22-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
recordfail
insmod part_msdos
insmod ext2
set root='(hd0,msdos3)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set $UUID_OF_BOOT_FILESYSTEM
linux /vmlinuz-2.6.35-22-generic root=/dev/mapper/$LVM_VOLUME_GROUP-root ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.35-22-generic
}
Note that $VARS are replaced in the actual grub.cfg with their corresponding values.
I rebooted back into the livecd and have unpacked the initrd image into a temp directory. It looks like the initrd image lacks LVM functionality. For example, if I'm reading /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/lvm2 (installed with lvm2 on the livecd-booted system, not present on the installed one) correctly, an lvm executable should be situated in /sbin; that is not the case.
What's the best way to remedy this situation? I realize that it would be easier to just use the alternate install CD, which apparently supports LVM, but I don't want to wait for it to download and then have to reinstall.
During system installation from a Desktop LiveCD (10.10) I checked the "Download updates during installation" option.
Before starting the install I had configured an apt proxy server.
The proxy server was configured by writing
Acquire::http { Proxy "http://apt-proxy-server:3142"; };
to the new file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/02proxy on the running system booted from the LiveCD.
This proxy was used correctly for my various package installs on the live system prior to launching the system installation GUI. It accesses apt-cacher-ng running in non-transparent mode on the machine apt-proxy-server.
However, the downloads taking place during the installation are not using this proxy. I verified that the file 02proxy had not been changed or removed.
Is there a way to force usage of an APT proxy during installation?
If I am doing backups from LVM snapshots of a live system, how can I best avoid problems due to the snapshot being taken during things like upgrades? Presumably this wouldn't be catastrophic, since it would be less serious than a power outage during the upgrade, but it could cause at least some amount of inconvenience.
I'd like to start using LVM snapshots to help ensure quality backups.
If I have a /var partition that is on a separate volume from the rest of the root filesystem, can I still ensure that a backup accurately reflects the state of the entire system at a particular point in time? Is it worthwhile, based on the nature of the files in /var, to be concerned with this?
The current ubuntu repo contains an extra set of packages for version 2.27.57 of the unison file sychronization utility:
$ aptitude search unison
p unison - A file-synchronization tool for Unix and W
p unison-gtk - A file-synchronization tool for Unix and W
p unison2.27.57 - A file-synchronization tool for Unix and W
p unison2.27.57-gtk - A file-synchronization tool for Unix and W
$ aptitude show '~nunison[^-]*$' | grep 'Package\|Version'
Package: unison
Version: 2.32.52-1ubuntu2
Package: unison2.27.57
Version: 2.27.57-2
What is the reason for this? Are there backwards incompatibilities in more recent versions of unison?
I'd like to do thorough backups, but want to avoid backing up files which can be replaced via apt.
Does this effectively just consist of omitting /usr, with the exception of /usr/local, as well as /lib*, from the backup?
Do some backup apps provide this functionality?
One of the problems with recommending Ubuntu to potential future users, especially those not particularly given to technical endeavours, is that there is a chance that upgrades will break their machine, and they'll have to pay or otherwise coerce some knowledgeable person into fixing them.
In my limited experience of running successive versions of Ubuntu since 8-something on a couple of different laptops, this chance is quite high. I'm not sure if I'm just unlucky with the hardware that I'm using, or if it's a result of the higher-than-average number of packages I have installed, or if upgrades are just typically problematic.
So I'd like to know the likelihood, for a casual user, of doing a release upgrade, for example from 10.04 to 10.10, without experiencing any regression bugs.
Obviously this is dependent on the hardware that people are running. Canonical seems to be making some efforts towards collecting data on this, for example with the "I am affected by this bug" checkbox on their issue tracker, and with the laptop compatibility reports, but I've not seen anything comprehensive.
I'm hoping for an objective reference here, for example a study carried out by relatively unbiased individuals. However, anecdotal evidence is probably useful too.
I'm running on UPS power and would like to prevent the laptop's battery from charging, to increase the amount of power available to other devices. Is there a way to do this?
The machine is a Dell Latitude D400. If people want more details, just ask.
Also, I'm gathering that I need to explain my desired setup a little better. I've gotten a bunch of suggestions about taking the battery out. I'm not sure if people are suggesting to take the battery out while the machine is running — this, as I understand, is not a good idea with most laptops — or to just remove the battery altogether.
The latter option is not optimal, because ideally I'd like to use the 30-60 minutes of power in the laptop battery and then switch over to UPS power. The details of the switch-over may constitute a separate question, but if I can't find a way to keep the laptop battery from charging, then removing the battery from the machine altogether may be the best way to do this. I'm not sure yet if this machine will run without a battery, but I'll check that out.
Other than the laptop, the UPS is just supporting a cable modem and router and a USB hub.
Again in the idealized version of this setup, all the power management changes would be automated, i.e. not require replugging anything or pressing Fn-keys. I'd like the machine to start using laptop battery power when apcupsd indicates that the UPS A/C is out, and then start using UPS power, but not charging the battery, when the battery is almost depleted.
An external 3½" HDD seems to be in danger of failing — it's making ticking sounds when idle.
I've acquired a replacement drive, and want to know the best strategy to get the data off of the dubious drive with the best chance of saving as much as possible.
There are some directories that are more important than others. However, I'm guessing that picking and choosing directories is going to reduce my chances of saving the whole thing. I would also have to mount it, dump a file listing, and then unmount it in order to be able to effectively prioritize directories. Adding in the fact that it's time-consuming to do this, I'm leaning away from this approach.
I've considered just using dd, but I'm not sure how it would handle read errors or other problems that might prevent only certain parts of the data from being rescued, or which could be overcome with some retries, but not so many that they endanger other parts of the drive from being saved. I guess ideally it would do a single pass to get as much as possible and then go back to retry anything that was missed due to errors.
Is it possible that copying more slowly — e.g. pausing every x MB/GB — would be better than just running the operation full tilt, for example to avoid any overheating issues?
For the "where is your backup" crowd: this actually is my backup drive, but it also contains some non-critical and bulky stuff, like music, that aren't backups, i.e. aren't backed up.
The drive has not exhibited any clear signs of failure other than this somewhat ominous sound. I did have to fsck a few errors recently — orphaned inodes, incorrect free blocks/inodes counts, inode bitmap differences, zero dtime on deleted inodes; about 20 errors in all.
The filesystem of the partition is ext3.
Running aptitude dist-upgrade on my system currently results in an attempt to upgrade a few packages. All of these packages are being flagged as "untrusted packages" which "could compromise your system's security". I have just recently added a new untrusted source to /etc/apt/sources.list.d, but I didn't expect that it would include any/all of these packages.
How can I find out which source is providing the newer versions of these packages?
Thanks to Karthick87 for an informative response. With that assistance, I was able to troubleshoot the underlying issue, which may itself be of interest to some readers.
It turned out that at least some of the updates in question were to be fetched from an official ubuntu mirror. I had been using that mirror without issues for some months now. I have done numerous dist-upgrades since upgrading to Maverick.
It looks like the issue is the same described by this bug report.
I've been able to resolve my problems by editing /etc/apt/sources.list to use the [Cc]anonical repository with lines like these:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu maverick main universe restricted multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu maverick main universe restricted multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu maverick-updates main universe restricted multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu maverick-updates main universe restricted multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu maverick-security main universe restricted multiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu maverick-security main universe restricted multiverse
After making the edits, I did sudo aptitude update; sudo aptitude dist-upgrade and did not get the warning message.
Today I had to force-shutdown my machine after it froze during resume from suspend. Since the reboot, I've found that the p key doesn't work normally in X. It does work normally in the console.
Modified keypresses, e.g. shift-p, ctrl-p, do work normally.
Pressing p with xev running gives
FocusOut event, serial 34, synthetic NO, window 0x5000001,
mode NotifyGrab, detail NotifyAncestor
FocusIn event, serial 34, synthetic NO, window 0x5000001,
mode NotifyUngrab, detail NotifyAncestor
KeymapNotify event, serial 34, synthetic NO, window 0x0,
keys: 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Could this problem be happening because of file corruption? What file would I check for corruption?
I've done an fsck on the system drive —by running tune2fs -C 200 /dev/sda3 before rebooting— which seems to have come up clean. I.E.
$ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sda3 | grep 'state\|check'
Filesystem state: clean
Last checked: Sat Dec 11 12:27:16 2010
Next check after: Thu Jun 9 13:27:16 2011
I'm running an updated (last dist-upgrade done yesterday) ubuntu 10.10.
Not sure if this is an appropriate question for this site, since it's not really specific to Ubuntu. Those who feel it isn't should probably respond to my crosspost on the Unix and Linux stackexchange site. Sorry for any confusion, I'm still negotiating the borderlines between these sites (and superuser.com, where I also crossposted). I guess we all are.
I make heavy use of workspaces, and have a lot of them (a 6x4 grid). I usually run openbox, but am currently using a machine that doesn't have openbox set up, so I'm using xfce because it's already mostly configured to my liking. I've gotten used to getting visual feedback when I switch workspaces, showing me which one I've just moved to, and am finding myself a bit disoriented in xfce. In openbox this is a big heads-up display, which is pretty much ideal. I'm aware that the workspace switcher panel applet will highlight the active workspace, but this only seems to work for workspaces which have some desktop space showing; since I generally have all my windows maximized, this isn't super helpful.
Is there a way to enable visual feedback showing the new workspace when switching workspaces in xfce?
Is it safe, with respect to the data on a USB drive, to power it down while the computer is suspended, and then power it back up before resuming? E.G. are buffers on the USB drive flushed as part of the suspend procedure? Are there likely to be any other unfortunate side effects?
Specifically under Maverick "10.10" Meerkat, with an IDE (PATA) drive, but of course it would be useful to get info on a variety of setups.
Note: by "suspend" I mean the S3, "mem" sleep state. However, answers pertaining to hibernation (S4) would also be helpful.