Guides on how to install drivers for a Brother all-in-one network printer are either for older devices or are rather complicated as they often involve editing or copying system files in my root directory.
Is there a newer, more convenient way to install the drivers needed?
My dynamically growing virtual disks (VDI) from various Ubuntu installations in Virtual Box are actually steadily "growing" indeed.
Deleting of files in the virtual machine does not free the space my VDI file took from the host hard disk space.
How do I shrink these files to give the unused hard disk space back to the host?
From the related question here the first I did was purging Steam
The next step would then be to also remove related files in ~/.local/share/Steam and in addition to the answers from above ~/.steam.
One thing makes me believe there still will be more to do. The reason I purged Steam in the first place was that on other user's account we get a message to install Steam on every login:
This will definitely not come from files in my home directory, and can also not be from a system-wide Steam package, as this was purged as can be seen from the Synaptic window in the background of the shot above. Also in the other user's accounts there is no ~/.steam or ~/.local/share/Steam directory. Autostart applications in ~/.config/autostart/ or /etc/xdg/autostart have no Steam related entries.
Where do I have to look for this "installer" to also remove it? Will there be any other Steam-related files cluttering my drives?
Here is running 12.04 LTS amd64 on a productive desktop. Steam was installed initially from the Software Center.
From the following questions
we see that gksu will no longer be supported in the long term, and it will not be installed by default from >= 13.04. Instead we should use pkexec which does its job fine for non-graphical applications but not for apllications on the GUI:
pkexec gedit
when replacing gksu in a .desktop file
EXEC=pkexec /usr/bin/gedit
or when I run a python script to run a graphical application with root permissions I get the following error:
>>>subprocess.Popen(['pkexec','gedit'])
** (gedit:3203): WARNING **: Could not open X display
How would I have to re-write my scripts or my .desktop files to support an authentication dialog and run an application as root if I should not have it depend on gksu?
Is there a way to stream the live output of the soundcard from our 12.04.1 LTS amd64 desktop to a DLNA-compliant external device in our network? Selecting media content in shared directories using Rygel, miniDLNA, and uShare is always fine - but so far we completely failed to get a live audio stream to a client via DLNA.
Pulseaudio claims to have a DLNA/UPnP media server that together with Rygel is supposed to do just this. But we were unable to get it running.
We followed the steps outlined in live.gnome.org, this answer here, and also in another similar guide.
In 12.04 LTS we can select the local audio device, or our GST-Launch stream in the DLNA client but Rygel displays the following message and the client states it reached the end of the playlist:
(rygel:7380): Rygel-WARNING **: rygel-http-request.vala:97: Invalid seek request
There was no way to listen to live audio streams on the client.
Only after a distribution upgrade to 14.04 LTS we were able to select a live stream on our DLNA renderers from settings nicely outlined in below answer. Still, we needed to select an established stream after we started rygel and were unable to push a new stream to our UPnP devices. Audio metadata were not transmitted.
Are there any other alternatives for sending the audio of our soundcard as live stream to a DLNA client?
Sometimes we need to send a message to a remote user. We can display messages on our local desktop using Notify OSD, but we are unable to send a message to the remote user's desktop.
We tried the following:
ssh user@remote
notify-send message
-> Sends message to the local display but not to the remote.
ssh admin@remote
sudo -u user "notify-send message"
sudo: notify-send user: command not found
-> There was a command not found error.
ssh -X user@remote "DISPLAY=:0 notify-send message"
-> Again sends the message to my local box only.
Is there any way to send a message to the remote desktop?
From the command line I can easily create another pulseaudio sink and switch to that but I have not found a way how to do this using a GUI from the Xfce desktop.
In GNOME I use gnome-volume-control from audio settings to switch to another audio output sink.
Is there anything similar in Xfce?
When booting to the graphical desktop fails we sometimes are recommended to boot into a "root shell" or to boot in "recovery mode".
How do I do that?
Access to our computer (not only to the internet) needs to be restricted for the accounts of my kids (7, 8) until they are old enough to manage this by themselves. Until then we need to be able to define the following:
In 11.10 all of the following that used to do the job don't work any more:
Are there any other alternatives?
I looking for a method to turn-off the screensaver and powermanager but from the command line.
I'm aware this can be done via the GUI screen - but can this be done via the command line or via some configuration editor?
Here is the gui way (via the "screen" or "brightness and lock" application):
My external 1TB hard drive is connected to the front USB2.0 socket on my 11.04 box. When copying files I have a very slow data transfer rate rate of approx. 12 MB/sec maximum even though from the hard disk utility it says it is connected at high-speed USB (480 MB/s):
This the output of lsusb:
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 046a:010a Cherry GmbH
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 008: ID 1058:1001 Western Digital Technologies, Inc. External Hard Disk [Elements]
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
This is the output of hdparm:
~$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sdc1
/dev/sdc1:
Timing cached reads: 1904 MB in 2.00 seconds = 952.06 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 96 MB in 3.06 seconds = 31.35 MB/sec
With this rate it takes hours to backup my frequently edited large video files. This it makes it almost unusuable, even more so because I know it could perform much better.
Changing the USB port to another one on the back of the computer and changing the cable to a brand new one did not make any change.
Is there any setting I need to make in addition to defaults of my still quite vanilla but update 11.04 here?
Some time ago, when I installed Ubuntu, I chose a rather stupid username for my account that I do not want to use anymore.
How do I change this (including the name of my home directory, and the name in the terminal) without losing settings for applications?
How do I keep permissions and my keys for various authentification (e.g. email, SSH, GPG and more)?
What settings could possibly get lost if I changed my username?
Running a regularly updated 10.04 LTS we have a weird issue with access to audio with pulseaudio 0.9.22. Sound device is ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)
but
and
In the two latter cases user1 is getting repeated errors in syslog:
protocol-native.c: Denied access to client with invalid authorization data
These errors disappear only after pulseaudio is started from user1 manually in a terminal. Then audio access is fine for both. There is an error module-alsa-card.c: Failed to find a working profile but still sound output is fine.
We both are not a member of the Audio Group. Deleting ~/.pulse from both accounts has no effect on this behaviour.
The issue started in 9.10 Karmic and continued to be there even after an upgrade to 10.04 Lucid LTS. This indicates that some erroneous settings survived the upgrades.
The dependency on boot order of users indicates that some other user specific settings may be involved, but we have no idea where to start searching. From tests with 3 users it seems that only settings for user2 are broken.
Loading pulseaudio modules module-esound-protocol-unix and module-native-protocol-unix with the option auth-anonymous=1 in both default.pa, and system.pa did not change this behaviour. Neither did it help to delete pulseaudio cookies ~/.esd_auth and ~/.pulse-cookie from both users.
Added here is our default.pa and our system.pa.
Suggestions 1) to 8) from the answer below did not make a change (running pulseaudio in system mode was not possible) but unplugging the external speaker, rebooting, plugging the speaker back in and reboot again from user1 did the trick.
It is still unclear where this hardware information was (erroneously) stored and why it affected only one user account.
When installing applications via the software center or by a DEB file they will usually be installed system wide for all users.
Is there a way to install an application for a single user only?
Broadcasting the output of the soundcard as an internet radio stream is a reliable way to stream audio in a network. This can nicely be used to e.g. transmit audio in a wireless LAN to another computer or any other device capable of playing internet radio streams.
However I did not find an easy step by step guide on how to set this up.
PulseAudio is the standard audio server in desktop installations. However in a server installation audio services and thus PulseAudio are not provided.
How do I install and make use of PulseAudio in a headless server?
Sometimes it may be needed that a user only has access to a certain application. Running the desktop environment then may be unwanted be it either for security reasons or for acchieving a better accessibility to the given application.
In these cases it may be desired to replace the desktop by an application that runs immediately after login.
Other users should have a normal access to their desktops.
Other than for Windows in Ubuntu there are no fancy utilities provided from printer manufacturers to print photos. I am aware of Gnome Photo Printer and of Photoprint, the first being easy to handle, the latter having more options. However I wonder if there are any other or maybe even better alternatives (including plugins) to perform the following tasks:
Any additional options like pre-processing for color correction or noise reduction would be nice to have but are not so essential.
According to this spec it seems not to so easy to accomplish the simple task of printing photos.
Indeed all applications I have gone through have major drawbacks that make printing photos almost impossible. Below I will list what put me off using them for photo printing:
After half a pack of ink cartridges and half a pack of photo paper cards I am getting tired of testing. At least Gimp and Picasa looked promising but both don't keep their promise when it comes to printing. I'd already be happy to quickly print a few photos with EOG if bug #80220 was fixed - but it's still on "wishlist".
The application in question does some action (here connecting audio to network streams) and runs minimized if these actions were successful. Therefore a status icon is needed to display the state of the connection (e.g. CONNECTED/DISCONNECTED). Only when clicking the icon the application window will open to give access to further options.
Using Python 2.6 and pyGtk I conveniently realised this by using gtk_status_icon. I deliberately wrote the application to run on as many distributions as possible including the various Ubuntu versions. I took care to use possible dependencies only after the user had installed them.
However now I hear that gtk_status_icon will no longer be supported in future Ubuntu releases. Developers are asked to use Application Indicators instead. What is then best practise to make sure that:
Application Indicator fallback mechanisms to gtk_status_icon won't work if indicator-applet is not running. Python interpreters will not run if there was no appindicator module to import from. Do I need to develop different versions for different distributions or is there a better way to come around this.
Where do I find a documentation on how to use ApplicationIndicator other than in the example given in Ubuntu Wiki? What commands are provided to check if indicator-applet is running to avoid programming different source codes for Ubuntu vs. non-Ubuntu distributions?
My Update Manager is set up to download and release security updates silently in the background. Therefore release notes are no longer displayed. I wonder if there is a way to read the release notes later. How could I find out which updates were installed recently and what bugs are fixed?