SpashHit's questions

I tried upgrading from 11.10 to 12.04. It got to the point of installing packages then I stepped away. When I got back the screen was black (possibly due to the screen saver). I left it for about 8 hours and there was no change. I then power-cycled and now it won't boot to a login screen. I tried hitting <Esc> repeatedly while powering up (to get to the Grub menu) but that has no effect.

What should I do now?

EDIT:

I can see the files on the hard disk once I boot from a Live CD. I saw some stuff online about using chroot and dpkg to continue an aborted upgrade from the command line. Is there any comprehensive guide on this?

I am having a really hard time getting ddclient (which updates OpenDNS with my current IP address) to work. I have it running as a daemon, but it never succeeds in updating my IP address at openDNS.

To troubleshoot, I am running ddclient from the command line as follows.

(In these examples, values in square brackets [] are stand-ins for the real values for security reasons)

My /etc/ddclient.conf contains:

use=web, web=checkip.dyndns.org/, web-skip='IP Address'
server=updates.opendns.com
protocol=dyndns2
login=[my login]
password=[my password]
Home

When I run:

sudo ddclient -daemon=0 -debug -verbose -noquiet

I get:

WARNING:  file /var/cache/ddclient/ddclient.cache, line 3: Invalid Value for keyword 'ip' = ''
...
WARNING:  skipping update of Home from <nothing> to [my real ip].
WARNING:   last updated <never> but last attempt on Tue Oct  4 08:38:32 2011 failed.

If I rm the cache file, ddclient does work once, but then it fails on subsequent times.

Possible Duplicate:
How can I make shutdown not require admin password?

When I'm logged in on my own account and try to do Restart or Shutdown from the "Power" menu, while others are also logged in, all that happens is that I get logged out. Everyone else stays logged in and the computer does not shut down. If I try to then do "Shutdown" or "Restart" from the Login screen, nothing happens.

In case it matters, in Users Settings, my Account Type is "Administrator", but everyone else is "Desktop User".

I'm trying to use PiTiVi... I can import clips from my video camera, but the Render button and all the editing buttons on the bottom toolbar are disabled. I suspect I need to install some packages but which ones?

I am not stuck on PiTiVi, but since it came with the OS, I was kind of expecting it to be the easiest to use...

I am considering buying a new computer with Windows 7 (64-bit) pre-installed. Would it be possible to install Ubuntu (preferably 64-bit) dual-boot on such a machine, and then, using VirtualBox / VMWare, etc. under Ubuntu, make a virtual machine that "points to" the existing Windows 7 OS (without making a copy of it)?

Just to be clear... at the end of this process:

• I would have a machine that dual-booted both Windows 7 (64-bit) and Ubuntu (64-bit).

• If I choose to boot Ubuntu, I would then have the possibility of running a visualization of Windows 7 within Ubuntu.

• There would only be 1 copy of Windows 7 on the hard disk.

I can't figure out how to get a file browser (Nautilus, etc.) in Netbook Edition 10.10 (Unity). How do I do this?

I was looking for Update Manager on Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition and couldn't find it, so in Terminal I did:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

I got a message saying some packages were "held back" and searching online gave me the suggestion to do:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

So I did that and it updated my kernel and now uname -a says I have 2.6.35-23-generic #40-Ubuntu SMP. My system is still working normally, but I'm now second-guessing if I did the right thing. Was this kernel update meant for the next version of Ubuntu? Should I try to back it out?

I sometimes use ssh to connect to a remote machine. Once I enter the passphrase once, I can use ssh again without the passphrase, but even if I come back a long time later, it still doesn't ask me, because the key is cached. I can do ssh-add -D to remove the key from the cache, but I want that to happen automatically after, say, 1 hour. How can I do that?

What's the easiest way to produce an invoice? It seems to be part of larger apps, but what if I just want the invoice capability without a lot of overhead?

I notice that sometimes after installing something from the Software Center, the software gets added to a menu and I get a nice message telling me how to launch it. Other times I get none of these and I have no idea how to launch the application.

In those cases I usually try pressing Alt-F2 and try to guess the name of the executable. Is there any way to improve this situation? What's the best way to "finish the job" of installing software that leaves me in this situation (i.e. add it to a menu)?

In order for Skype to work with the mic in my webcam, I need to change the sound preferences -> Input to "0825 Analog Mono" (default is "Internal Audio Analog Stereo"). However whenever I reboot this gets reset. How can I make it the default?

When I use skype the video looks really dark (both to me and the other person). But it doesn't seem to be a problem with the webcam itself, because with Cheese the image looks fine.

I upgraded from 10.04 to 10.10 but my desktop shell did not change to Unity. How can I change it myself to check it out (and change back if I decide to)?

How do you switch Ubuntu to another (human) language without reinstalling it?

I have a Dell Mini 9 Netbook with Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Remix. I can get on my home Wifi fine, but when I try to connect to a tethered connection (on my Palm Pre phone), it won't connect, even though it sees the connection. Even if I turn off encryption, it still won't connect. I can connect to the tethered connection fine from my Win7 laptop (even with encryption).

When using the MySQL command line interface, is there any way to get it to let you use vi command editing keys instead of emacs?

I had Ubuntu 10.4 working fine with the previous version of VirtualBox on a Windows 7 host.

Then I upgraded to VirtualBox to 3.2.10, reinstalled the Linux Guest Additions, and now I am limited to 1008 x 584 resolution in full-screen mode! I have reinstalled Guest Additions and rebooted the guest OS several times.

I seem to remember hearing about a special version of Wine that was optimized for games. What is this Wine called and where can I get it?

When a GUI program malfunctions in some way (crashes, etc.) I often use the trick of running it from the command line (instead of from the menu). That way I see the messages it outputs to stdout and stderr which sometimes gives me a clue as to what went wrong (or at least a message I can Google to take me further down the "solution path").

Is there any way I can get all GUI programs to save their stdout and stderr somewhere so I can diagnose problems without having to start them from the command line? Not only would this be more convenient, it would help users who don't know about this trick.

My video camera records onto a memory card which mounts in Ubuntu with no problem. I see a bunch of .mp4 files, but what software do I use now? I installed PiTiVi and repeatedly tried to import the folder of .mp4 files but it keeps crashing after importing a few of them. I tried running pitivi from the command line to see if it output any messages, but all I saw were errors about creating thumbnails and then "Segmentation fault". Now what?