donatello's questions

I have pretty much the same problem as in Dell XPS 13 9350 with Ubuntu 15.10 - Touchpad freezing, jumping - but on Ubuntu 16.04.

My touchpad stops working randomly, or can work somewhat only if I click and drag with it. Sometimes it starts working if I do a two-finger scroll, but this doesn't always work.

I have installed a mainline kernel (version 4.4.13-040413-generic) to fix an issue related to resuming after suspend. However, the present touchpad issue was present on a vanilla 16.04 install too.

Any help is appreciated. How would I even begin debugging this? (I am not shy to use the terminal or modify my system, as long as I know how to bring it back to a working version, in case the experiment fails).

I have a new Dell Ubuntu pre-installed laptop. It came with 11.10 and I've just upgraded it to 12.04 (Precise).

Firefox has its homepage set to Yahoo search and the default search engine is Yahoo too. I want to change the home page and the default search engine. Every time I change this, the settings do not stick until the next time I start the browser again.

There don't seem to be any such settings that I can change in Edit->Preferences. (It does not stick until the next startup of the browser if I change the homepage in the Preferences/General tab).

I have two WiFi connected computers via a WiFi modem/router to share my internet connection. This setup works fine to access the internet but I am not able to effectively transfer files between these two computers. The maximum speed is around 300 KB/s and it fluctuates a lot (generally going downwards). Sometimes the download even stalls. Is there something wrong with my Wifi drivers?

All my wireless devices are capable of 54 Mbps connectivity. I don't see anything near it while transferring data over my WiFi router to the other computer. Has anybody else seen better performance?

I have an ethernet cable (not a crossover cable) to connect my laptop and my desktop ubuntu machines. I want to transfer large amounts of data. Is it possible with such a cable? I believe that between two Windows machines such a connection is possible (though I'm not totally sure).

On desktop machines, the Update Manager application is able to show the details of a package upgrade in the section called "Description of update" in the bottom half of the screen. Is there a way to see this information for a server machine using the command line?

I use GNOME. I want to use Amarok, but tool tips are just black boxes in Maverick. Here's what it looks like:

Is it possible to correct this by changing some settings or it is a bug? I saw this - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10186430 - on the Ubuntu forums, but deleting the .kde folder did not help in my case and didn't seem to help any others either.

Every time I use the CLI to install something with aptitude I get this output:

warning, in file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 60509 package 'virtualbox-3.0':
 error in Version string '3.0.10-54097_Ubuntu_karmic': invalid character in revision number
warning, in file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 60510 package 'virtualbox-3.0':
 error in Config-Version string '3.0.10-54097_Ubuntu_karmic': invalid character in revision number
warning, in file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 64255 package 'virtualbox-3.0':
 error in Version string '3.0.10-54097_Ubuntu_karmic': invalid character in revision number
Selecting previously deselected package libppl7.
(Reading database ... 328408 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking libppl7 (from .../libppl7_0.10.2-7ubuntu1_amd64.deb) ...
...
...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
warning, in file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 60773 package 'virtualbox-3.0':
 error in Version string '3.0.10-54097_Ubuntu_karmic': invalid character in revision number
warning, in file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 60774 package 'virtualbox-3.0':
 error in Config-Version string '3.0.10-54097_Ubuntu_karmic': invalid character in revision number
warning, in file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 64482 package 'virtualbox-3.0':
 error in Version string '3.0.10-54097_Ubuntu_karmic': invalid character in revision number
Setting up libppl7 (0.10.2-7ubuntu1) ...
...

How can I fix this? I have even removed virtualbox, but this output still persists.

There is this on the Ubuntu forums http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1578934 but it did not work for me (Which step in the process given there actually fixes this problem?!).

EDIT: The installation process itself works, but these lines are cluttering up the output.

I have so far been using Skype to do conference calls on Ubuntu Maverick. I want to stop using Skype because the client looks pretty bad (or has a number of minor bugs) in the default Ubuntu theme (e.g. menu items don't display unless you point at them), and it seems to use up a lot of my CPU while audio calling.

Are there any audio conferencing (i.e. 2-10 people in a call simultaneously) tools that are FOSS and work quite well in Ubuntu?

EDIT:

Some additional requirements:
1) I want to have minimal setup and use open protocols if possible.
2) I need a s/w feature to record the call (I'm planning to make podcasts).
3) Cross platform - The people I call may be on a difference OS, so a suitable client should be available for their system too (Win/Mac).