Dennis's questions

This morning before I upgraded when I rolled the scroll wheel any active program would scroll as long as the wheel was turning. After upgrade to 19.04 after waking from suspend (closing the laptop) when I roll the wheel the view scrolls a few lines then stops, it won't scroll again until I spin the scroll wheel a few more times.

Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 4000

It happens in every program including a virtual-box boot up of Windows, and only seems to be after waking from suspend. Unplugging the USB receiver and plugging it back in restores the sensitivity but to me that isn't a fix, jsut a work around.

How do I stop whatever system behavior in suspend which is disrupting the mouse settings? How do I restore it without physical intervention (automatically on wake up if possible)

And why did the upgrade break it, or could it be that much of a coincidence?

This was happening in 16.04 but I was hoping that an upgrade to the latest everything would fix it. I installed tuxmath using "apt install" and it shows up in the Applications menu so I added it to my favorites and now have an icon in the bar. However when I click the icon the program starts to work then crashes just before the menu items appear. When I run from a command line the output is

libpng warning: Interlace handling should be turned on when using png_read_image
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

I find that if I run in windowed mode everything is fine, but I really need to modify the launcher for the kids. How do I add the -w to the command initiated by the icon in the launcher?

The high usage starts immediately after boot, pauses for 2-3 seconds every minute or so but otherwise uses the resources to the extent that the computer is useless. I can get my system back temporarily by issuing a killall unity-panel-service but that comes with some usability overhead and isn't a solution.

If the answer is yes, what service / app make it possible?

First the caveat: I understand that this question involves Mate and a Raspberry Pi so if you consider it outside the realm of this forum just ignore it. But on the chance that it may be helpful or typical of something involving snaps or that platform, here goes.

I decided to try and install the nextcloud snap. It threw a ton of errors and seemed to freeze in the middle of the process (for over an hour). I killed it and just decided to try and remove it. The install looked like....

$ sudo snap install nextcloud
2016-06-24T08:48:29-04:00 ERROR cannot setup apparmor for snap "nextcloud": cannot load apparmor profile "snap.nextcloud.apache": cannot load apparmor profile: exit status 1
apparmor_parser output:
Cache read/write disabled: interface file missing. (Kernel needs AppArmor 2.4 compatibility patch.)
Warning: unable to find a suitable fs in /proc/mounts, is it mounted?
Use --subdomainfs to override.

2016-06-24T08:53:29-04:00 ERROR cannot setup apparmor for snap "nextcloud": cannot load apparmor profile "snap.nextcloud.apache": cannot load apparmor profile: exit status 1
apparmor_parser output:
Cache read/write disabled: interface file missing. (Kernel needs AppArmor 2.4 compatibility patch.)
Warning: unable to find a suitable fs in /proc/mounts, is it mounted?
Use --subdomainfs to override.

[|] Setup snap "nextcloud" security profiles

When I try snap remove nextcloud I get

error: cannot remove "nextcloud": snap "nextcloud" has changes in progress

What I would primarily like to do is properly remove the snap and recover the space from the partition it created. If partition is the correct term??

$ lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0         7:0    0  46.6M  0 loop /snap/ubuntu-core/120
loop1         7:1    0 113.9M  0 loop /snap/nextcloud/12
mmcblk0     179:0    0  14.9G  0 disk
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0    64M  0 part /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0  14.8G  0 part /

I tried

snap abort nextcloud

and got

error: cannot find change with id "nextcloud"

I should also note that it doesn't show up as installed as I get only the following

$ snap list
Name Version Rev Developer Notes
ubuntu-core 16.04+20160531.12-01 120 canonical -

Though it does show up in....

$ snap interfaces
:network nextcloud
:network-bind nextcloud

I tried

$ snap changes
ID   Status  Spawn                 Ready  Summary
1    Doing   2016-06-24T12:39:20Z  -      Install "nextcloud" snap

$ sudo snap abort 1

$ snap changes
ID   Status  Spawn                 Ready  Summary
1    Abort   2016-06-24T12:39:20Z  -      Install "nextcloud" snap

But the partition is still there.

** Update, I ran the entire process again for debugging purposes and just let it sit after the "snap abort 1" command. At some point something seems to have completed in the background because lsblk shows nothing and the snap interfaces query shows nothing.

I go into a local coffee shop with public wifi and try to connect. The connection shows up in network manager so I click on it and it says it is connected. Apparently the next thing I should do is open a browser and accept the acceptable use policy. However when I open Firefox it just shows the start page which I'm assuming is local and if I try to go anyplace on the internet says "connecting" and never goes anyplace. How am I supposed to get to the "Acceptable Use" page?

The network manager is set to Automatic for everthing and when I sit down and click connect on the indicator icon, after it says connected, it appears to be ready to go. If I edit things in the connection properties that I know will cause it to fail the browser shows the "server not found" page when I try to access the internet, but if I leave everthing set to automatic and get the connection shown below it just freezes at "connecting".

I have tried firefox and chromium and they both act the same, but could there be something in the way I have my browsers configured that aren't allowing them to re-direct to the "acceptable use" page? Are there other tools that might help diagnose what is going on?

State: connected (global)

- Device: wlan0  [TimHortons-US-Staging] ---------------------------------------
  Type:              802.11 WiFi
  Driver:            iwl3945
  State:             connected
  Default:           yes
  HW Address:        <MAC address removed>

  Capabilities:
    Speed:           54 Mb/s

  Wireless Properties
    WEP Encryption:  yes
    WPA Encryption:  yes
    WPA2 Encryption: yes

  Wireless Access Points (* = current AP)
    *TimHortons-US-Staging: Infra, <MAC address removed>, Freq 2437 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 67

  IPv4 Settings:
    Address:         10.2.242.244
    Prefix:          16 (255.255.0.0)
    Gateway:         10.2.1.1

    DNS:             208.67.222.222
    DNS:             208.67.220.220

I have a system with two accounts. The primary (and administrator) account automatically logs in at boot time and is used 95% of the time. On occasion I need to logout and switch to a secondary account dedicated to part time work which is set to log in without a password (just click login). When I log out of that account I would like to log back into the other without a password but I don't see any way to set that as an option in the "Users and Accounts".

I know how to get disable the password when the screen goes to sleep and I want to keep the password intact because it seems like it is necessary for administrative purposes. Having something that could easily be reversed would also be a plus (in other words just re-enable the password for login).

This is marked as a duplicate, but that question does not answer my specifics and the methods referenced do not show up in my stock 13.04 install. I have placed an answer below that did fit the bill.

My 12.10 computer has several accounts on it. My wife has a Kindle Keyboard 3G that she manages with Calibre. The problem is that every time she tries to eject the device in Calibre if asks for my password. Mine is the main administrative account which may be why it wants my password.

I'm not at the computer so am not positive whether I could eject from the file manager without a password, though I know that other USB flash drives don't require it.

Everything seemed to install fine. I can start google earth and all layers are available, I can even zoom in and look at 3-D buildings. But there is absolutely no image data displayed at all. If you look at the whole globe the outlines are there on an invisible globe. As you zoom in the base looks dark grey almost black but there is no image. I have tried:

Tools > Options > Graphics > Safe Mode
Tools > Options > Texture colors > all combinations
Tools > Options > Cache (tried several changes to the numbers)

lspci shows

Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller (rev 03)    

Running on a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop (1.5Gb memory)

I got a new laptop which makes my old one with a dual boot of XP and 11.10 redundant. Everything has been moved over and this is a perfect chance to play around with variants. I would like to replace the Ubuntu with Lubuntu but assume that if I just remove the Ubuntu partition to make room there will be issues with the existing grub. Is there a way to do this?

Or as another possibility I could shrink the Ubuntu partition and install something in the empty space. Will an Ubuntu based installer recognize what is going on and set up a triple boot as effortlessly as it does a dual boot?

After an upgrade to 11.10 (kernel: Linux lucid 3.0.0-13-generic #22-Ubuntu) which probably also updated Skype to 2.2.35 (not sure because I never checked the version before) the sound that comes back from an echo test is very high pitched and squeaky. I'm not sure if when in a call if the other person can't hear or just doesn't know what they are hearing. I am using a USB Logitech C250

Audacity records fine, gmail video chat works fine, but if I start sound recorder I get a "Could not negotiate format", followed by "Could not get/set settings from/on resource". I don't know if this is a Skype problem or a wider Pulse problem.

My only real needs are the gmail and Audacity, though I have a couple of contacts that I can only Skype with.

I have an installation of 10.10 that has been working fine since I upgraded. One day I booted it and there was no network connectivity. The network indicator now says "Networking disabled". If I go to System > Administration > Network Tools > Devices the loopback is the default and though Eth0 shows up, if I select it everything is blank in the configuration and there is nothing in the interface statistics. lspci shows

Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family LAN Controller (rev 01)

I have another card handy but would like to learn how to diagnose things like this. For example Is there a software reason that a working card would just stop working? Can the card be so visible but be totally broken? What steps can I try to "Enable" the card and networking or is there something that would point to hardware right off?

UPDATE: It is now working but I would accept the best explanation that might help someone else of why it is working or why I'm still in trouble.
Originally the only thing that showed up in the network indicator was the disabled text and there was no "Enable Networking". Based on another post I tried sudo dhclient eth0 though I have no idea what it does. It returned an ip address and I could browse to specific local ips. Then I rebooted to see what would happen and I had the same original problem so I did dhclient again but this time noticed that "Enable Networking" was now showing up in the indicator so I checked it. This time I rebooted and everything is working fine. But I still don't know why it stopped or why the steps I took worked.

I have been running Conversation Network's Levelator for a couple of years without problem. With the latest Wine (1.3.28) it won't start. It gives me the Encountered a serious problem dialog and in the terminal shows

fixme:actctx:parse_depend_manifests Could not find dependent assembly L"Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls" (6.0.0.0)
fixme:actctx:parse_depend_manifests Could not find dependent assembly L"Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls" (6.0.0.0)
wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00000400 at address 0x68486a63 (thread 0009)

I'm not sure where to go from here, is there anything I can set, can I easily roll back to a previous wine?

If I pay for a program can I install it on the three computers I use on a daily basis?

How is licensing decided or are there any restrictions on licenses used?

Where are these kinds of questions documented?

I have been running 10.10 on my laptop and like it. I would like to upgrade my 10.04 LTS box at home by just enabling normal releases in update manager.

Should this work, or have I caused a problem by waiting past the 11.04 release?

I'm working in 10.04 Lucid. All my video players (Movie Player and VLC) and the preview windows in editors (OpenShot and Pitivi) will only display a black screen when playing a video. The sound is fine and the videos work fine on other computers.

I have tried multiple formats from varying sources .MOV taken from old ffmpeg projects, .AVI straight from a camera, .MP4 using h.264 from OpenShot on another system, .OGV from a gtk-recordmydesktop session on this very computer. I even get a pure black screen in the viewer when starting a remote session in VNC.

This box has a GeForce 8400 GS using the proprietary Nvidia drivers in case it may be a card problem or setting.

I have a 60Gb drive in a Dell Latitude D600. It all started with trying to install 10.10 as a dual boot. First installation failed at the partitioning stage, next I tried manual partition that also failed. I finally went to Gparted LiveCD to see what I could do.

It allows me to shrink the NTFS, create a swap partition, create a partition in the remaining space. If however I try to format the empty partition as ext3 or ext4 it fails, the drive disappears from Gparted and I have to reboot. When I come back in, the blank space is there with no file system.

If I try to format the new partition in NTFS or Fat32 (as a test) it works fine and Windows can see it.

I even tried creating a FAT32 partition, doing and Ubuntu install to that disk, allocating almost all of it to Ubuntu (thinking I could use the small remainder as a shared disk), it started the install but failed after several minutes of copying with a warning about can not fsync (something) and something about RW problems.

(clarification because based on comments I thoroughly confused the issue, I didn't actually try to install to the FAT32, I just thought that it was odd that Gparted was successful in creating it, so kept the FAT32 which I thought was ok then let the installer shrink it and do whatever it wanted which was of course creating a ext4 beside the shrunken partition. This was an academic exercise since nothing was working anyway and thank all for pointing out my mistaken wording)

At this point I can't install Ubuntu because there seems to be now way to create a suitable partition.

Switched my sister to Ubuntu because I got tired of re-installing the other OS every 6 months. Now she managed to get some malware in her Firefox on Ubuntu. Without access to the computer (or when I get it next week), where should I look, what questions can I ask, what could I tell a computer novice to try over the phone?

Symptoms:
While surfing some recipe site she had an ad-window pop up with no window controls. She rebooted the computer and when she re-started Firefox it came back, full screen, no controls, on top.

I told her to just use -F2 and xkill to get rid of it, which it did but stopped Firefox completely. On re-start it was back, I told her to hit F11 which did take it back to a large screen, but not full-screen, so she could see that there was a normal browser window running underneath. She topped the normal window but the only other thing I had time to check was plug-ins, which there wasn't anything that sounded suspicious. I'm looking for ideas of what to try over the phone, or where to start next week.

I'm comfortable with the command line, and using about:config if that makes any difference in the answer.

I use a login list with faces and the icons and text are tiny in GDM. Is there an easy way to change the resolution of the login screen? I'm currently using 10.04 Lucid.

After I finish working with a removable flash drive I click eject icon in nautilus. If it is appropriate I get a dialog asking if I would like to empty the trash before it un-mounts. I click yes and everything works fine except my Docky launcher disappears. All I need to do is go up to the menu and re-start it, but that can't be right, and I'm not sure how to make it quit. If it matters I have the Trash, and Mounter docklets running.