misha's questions

There is an implementation for the Scheme programming language called STk. That's the one used in computer science video courses published by Berkley on YouTube. I want to have it on my machine as well so that I can follow their courses exactly (although I do have MIT/GNU Scheme already installed), but they, the people who maintain the STk Scheme interpreter, don't have a package version that I could install using the apt-get utility. So, I went to their website and downloaded the file STk-4.0.1.tar.gz from here. Unpacked it to /usr/local/src (I changed the ownership of the directory using the command sudo chown $USER /usr/local/src. Cded into the directory. Unpacked the tarball using this command tar -xzvf STk-4.0.1.tar.gz. Cded into the newly created directory. And now I'm trying to build the application by running the configure script:

$ ./configure
creating cache ./config.cache
checking for ranlib... ranlib
Using 'gcc' compiler
Using '-O2' compilation options
Assumming OS is LINUX
checking for gcc... gcc
checking whether the C compiler (gcc   ) works... yes
checking whether the C compiler (gcc   ) is a cross-compiler... no
checking whether we are using GNU C... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for POSIXized ISC... no
checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E
checking for X... libraries , headers 
checking for dnet_ntoa in -ldnet... no
checking for dnet_ntoa in -ldnet_stub... no
checking for gethostbyname... yes
checking for connect... yes
checking for remove... yes
checking for shmat... yes
checking for IceConnectionNumber in -lICE... yes
checking fd_set and sys/select... yes
Multiple precision library: libgmp
Hash tables support: yes
Posix support: yes
STklos support: yes
Socket support: yes
Regexp support: yes
Process support: yes
Html support: yes
Base64 support: yes
Locale support: yes
Pixmap Images support: yes
JPEG Images support: yes
Determining options for dynamic loading for LINUX
     Linux: no dynamic loading method chosen

not updating unwritable cache ./config.cache
creating ./config.status
creating Makefile
creating Utils/STk.spec
**** Configuring Src directory
creating cache ./config.cache
checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E
checking for unistd.h... yes
checking for limits.h... yes
checking for sigaction... yes
checking for select... yes
checking for dlopen in -ldl... yes
checking for socket in -lsocket... no
checking for t_accept in -lnsl... no
checking for ANSI C header files... yes
checking for pid_t... yes
checking fd_set and sys/select... yes
not updating unwritable cache ./config.cache
creating ./config.status
creating Makefile
**** Configuring Extensions directory
creating cache ./config.cache
checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E
checking for unistd.h... yes
checking for limits.h... yes
checking for sigaction... yes
not updating unwritable cache ./config.cache
creating ./config.status
creating Makefile
creating stk-genmake
**** Configuring Stack directory
creating cache ./config.cache
checking for gcc... gcc
checking whether we are using GNU C... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for ranlib... ranlib
ln: failed to create symbolic link 'libstack.c': File exists
Stack library configuration
         Machine type:  UNKNOWN_ARCH
    Low level support: 
not updating unwritable cache ./config.cache
creating ./config.status
creating libstack.h
creating Makefile
**** Configuring Tcl directory
creating cache ./config.cache
checking for ranlib... ranlib
checking whether cross-compiling... no
checking for getcwd... yes
checking for opendir... yes
checking for strerror... yes
checking for strstr... yes
checking for strtol... yes
checking for tmpnam... yes
checking for waitpid... yes
checking for strerror... (cached) yes
checking for getwd... yes
checking for wait3... yes
checking for uname... yes
checking for sin... no
checking for -lieee... yes
checking dirent.h... yes
checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E
checking for errno.h... yes
checking for float.h... yes
checking for limits.h... yes
checking for stdlib.h... yes
checking for string.h... yes
checking for sys/wait.h... yes
checking for unistd.h... yes
checking fd_set and sys/select... yes
checking for sys/time.h... yes
checking whether time.h and sys/time.h may both be included... yes
checking whether struct tm is in sys/time.h or time.h... time.h
checking for tm_zone in struct tm... yes
checking tm_tzadj in struct tm... no
checking tm_gmtoff in struct tm... yes
checking timezone variable... yes
checking proper strstr implementation... yes
checking for strtoul... yes
checking for strtod... yes
checking for strtod... (cached) yes
checking for Solaris strtod bug... ok
checking for ANSI C header files... yes
checking for mode_t... yes
checking for pid_t... yes
checking for size_t... yes
checking for uid_t in sys/types.h... yes
checking for opendir... (cached) yes
checking sys_errlist... yes
checking union wait... yes
checking matherr support... yes
checking for vfork... yes
checking vfork/signal bug... ok
checking for strncasecmp... yes
checking for BSDgettimeofday... no
checking for gettimeofday... yes
checking for gettimeofday declaration... present
checking for -linet... no
checking for net/errno.h... no
checking for connect... yes
checking for gethostbyname... yes
checking system version (for dynamic loading)... ./configure: 1: ./configure: Syntax error: Unterminated quoted string
**** Configuring Tk directory
creating cache ./config.cache
checking for ranlib... ranlib
checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E
checking for unistd.h... yes
checking for limits.h... yes
checking stdlib.h... yes
checking fd_set and sys/select... yes
checking whether cross-compiling... no
checking for ANSI C header files... yes
checking for mode_t... yes
checking for pid_t... yes
checking for size_t... yes
checking for uid_t in sys/types.h... yes
checking for sys/time.h... yes
checking whether time.h and sys/time.h may both be included... yes
checking for X... libraries , headers 
checking for X11 header files... checking for -lXbsd... no
checking for connect... yes
checking for gethostbyname... yes
checking for sin... no
checking for -lieee... yes
checking for memmove... yes
checking whether char is unsigned... no
checking for strtod... yes
checking for Solaris 2.4 strtod bug... ok
updating cache ./config.cache
creating ./config.status
creating Makefile


SUMMARY
*******
   Your system is  LINUX
   C compiler is: gcc
   Compilation options: -O2
   Dynamic loading enabled: no
   X11 libraries directory:
   X11 headers directory:

   You have chosen the following options
        Multiple precision library:      libgmp
        Hash tables support:             yes
        Posix support:                   yes
        STklos support:                  yes
        Socket support:                  yes
        Regexp support:                  yes
        Process support:                 yes
        Html support:                    yes
        Pixmap Images support:           yes
        Jpeg Images support:             yes
        Base64 support:                  yes
        Locale support:                  yes

If this is correct, you can just type 'make' now at your shell prompt.
Otherwise, rerun configure with proper options (see the README file for
a description of STk configure options.)

Now, I need to use the make utility to compile the application, but I can't. This is the error I get:

$ make
make Tcl
make[1]: Entering directory '/usr/local/src/STk-4.0.1/Tcl'
make[1]: *** No rule to make target 'unix'.  Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/usr/local/src/STk-4.0.1/Tcl'
Makefile:81: recipe for target 'tcl-dir' failed
make: *** [tcl-dir] Error 2

I'm probably doing something wrong.

Is there a pre-assigned keyboard shortcut for switching between different keyboard layouts in Ubuntu Mate?

Here's the problem. I had a bunch of files in a directory. Then I created another directory in that directory. Then I cobbled together this command:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec mv {} ./1 \;

This command was supposed to take all the files in the directory and move them to that newly-created directory, but instead of providing the name of the directory, I screwed up and typed 1, as you can see from the code snippet. So, I ended up having just one text file named 1 that now contains the stuff from one of the disappeared files and that's all.

Is there any chance I could recover the lost files (or possibly the actual data from the files--they were all text files) or are they pretty much permanently gone?

Before:

misha@hp-laptop:~/Documents/prgmg/work$ ls
add.s  bubble.s  cpuid.s  div.s    hello.s  mult.s       sum.s   test.s
a.out  c         demo.s   gas.txt  max.s    print_arr.s  test.c
misha@hp-laptop:~/Documents/prgmg/work$ mkdir asm

After:

misha@hp-laptop:~/Documents/prgmg/work$ ls
1  asm  c

So, as you can see, I wanted to put all assembly language files into the asm directory. And as things stand now, 1 is a text file and it contains the stuff from gas.txt.

I'm on Ubuntu Mate 16.04. I would like someone to give me a short introduction to the basic usage of the udisks utility on Linux systems. Specifically, I would like to know how to properly mount and unmount an external USB drive.

I'm trying to install the udisks utility. The problem is that it says that I have already the newest version of udisks installed on my computer:

sudo apt-get install udisks2
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
udisks2 is already the newest version (2.1.7-1ubuntu1).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 83 not upgraded.

However, running the following command produces no output which indicates that I don't have it installed:

which udisks2

Running commands like the following one gives me an error:

udisks2 --unmount /dev/sdb
udisks2: command not found

The playback is very choppy plus every time I try to rewind the video using the arrow keys on my keyboard, it feels like everything is just slow and there's a noticeable delay between the audio and video tracks. This makes it virtually impossible to watch anything HD. Other files such as MP3s and non-HD-quality videos work just fine.

Before I installed Ubuntu Mate 16.04 LTS on my laptop, I used the Videos video player that ships natively with Ubuntu as its default video player. The same thing was true even there, HD videos wouldn't play in VLC, but when I opened the same HD files in Videos, everything worked fine. I'd really like to use Videos again, but the problem is that Ubuntu Mate does not have Videos listed as an installable package in its Software Boutique.

I just bought a Blu Ray writer (Pioneer BDR-TD05AS 6x Blu-Ray BD-RE Writer Burner).

The writer itself is internal, but I bought a special box (3Q ODD)

that you put it in and then connect the whole thing to the laptop with a USB cord. Now, when I plug the cord into my laptop, nothing happens. I guess I need some sort of driver to make the laptop see the writer and software to burn Blu Ray disks. I've never done this before. Could you please help me figure out all the things I need in order to be able to burn Blu Ray disks?

misha@hp-laptop:~$ lsusb
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 0bda:5775 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. HP "Truevision HD" laptop camera
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0458:003a KYE Systems Corp. (Mouse Systems) NetScroll+ Mini Traveler / Genius NetScroll 120
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

In System Settings -> User Accounts, you can tick on and off the Show my login name in in the menu bar option.

The problem being is that when I tick it off (I don't want my login name to be displayed in the menu bar), it also hides the Ubuntu cogwheel thing that lets you do things like logging in as a different user, rebooting and shutting down your computer et cetera. And I don't want that. I just want to hide the user name.

I use the following command to transfer files across my home network (when I have to transfer a lot of files, I usually archive them with the tar utility):

scp -c blowfish [FILE] [USER]@[ADDRESS]:[PATH]

It takes about 25 minutes to send 500 Mb of data to another computer. The average speed is at about 600 KB/s. I think there absolutely must be a way to make the process go faster because I don't believe that I'm able to pull a 1 Gb file comfortably off the Web in less than 10 minutes, but I can't get a 500 Mb file sent across the network in less that time.

That volume slider graphic thing kind of disappeared. I'm not talking about the volume icon in the system tray, but the one that quickly flashes in and out when you press the volume control keys on your keyboard. Interestingly, sometimes, very rarely though, it does show up, but most of the times it doesn't. And I don't know what is causing this erratic behaviour. Can this be fixed?

Here's what I'm talking about (this is not mine, just a picture I pulled off the Web):

PS: I'm using the Gnome Classic desktop environment in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

I'm unable to install VLC media player (better to say, reinstall because it seems like VLC just vanished after I experienced an error trying to install additional video codecs). When I try to do that via the Ubuntu Software Center, it says that package dependencies cannot be resolved. Here's a picture of that:

This happened after I tried to open a video file in Ubuntu's default video player Videos which asked me to install additional video codecs or such (which was not successful, by the way). After that, my VLC player seems to have all but disappeared from the system. And now, I can't open files with Videos either. The program asks for additional packages which it is, again, unable to install.

Why can't I use the left and right arrow keys (actually, the same goes for the up and down keys as well) to move about the line I'm currently on in the tclsh interactive shell? If I try to press either one, I get a bunch of abracadabra instead of moving back and forth. This is not all that convenient when, for example, you make a typo, but you can't move the cursor back to change it. You have to use the backspace key to erase all the stuff that you've typed after the place where the typo is located thereby destroying all your work. Is it possible to fix this, quite frankly, buggy behaviour?

I'm not talking about closing the terminal window itself which you can easily do by using the exit command. I'm talking about closing a tab that you have originally opened up by pressing the CtrlShiftT key combination. When I'm done working with it, I would like to close it down without lifting my hands up from the keyboard and going for the mouse to click that small X button. Is there a command for that?

The problem is that Ubuntu always resets the brightness level to maximum after every reboot. I installed the xbacklight utility, but commands like xbacklight -get or xbacklight -set XX don't work. I get nothing as the output.

Actually, I would like to make my Ubuntu remember the level of brightness that was used last. How exactly can I do that? Here's some information:

ls -l /sys/class/backlight/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Feb 27 09:43 radeon_bl0 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/drm/card0/card0-LVDS-1/radeon_bl0


ls -l /sys/class/backlight/radeon_bl0/
total 0
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Feb 27 09:54 actual_brightness
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Feb 27 09:54 bl_power
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Feb 27 09:47 brightness
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Feb 27 09:54 device -> ../../card0-LVDS-1
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Feb 27 09:43 max_brightness
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    0 Feb 27 09:54 power
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Feb 27 09:54 subsystem -> ../../../../../../../class/backlight
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Feb 27 09:43 type
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Feb 27 09:42 uevent

uname -r
4.2.0-30-generic

I installed the gnome-panel utility, but when I switched to Gnome Metacity, windows there appeared to have no shadows. Here's a picture:

It's actually very difficult to work against white backgrounds with windows that don't have clearly delineated borders. I'm wondering if there is a way to somehow get those drop shadows back?

I know that getting your touchpad disabled is as easy as toggling the on/off button in System Settings, but unfortunately it only works for the current session. After a reboot, the touchpad is back on.

Here's exactly what I mean by that. Let's say I pulled a Microsoft Office docx file off the Web. I know I can easily open it up in LibreOffice and make changes to it. I'm also able to save it. If I take that file now and try to open it in Microsoft Office, will I see all my changes that I made to it in LibreOffice without MIcrosoft Office complaining?

I installed Ubuntu on a machine with Windows 8.1. And I think I screwed up big time while trying to figure out how to make the system a dual-booting one (the Ubuntu installer didn't detect that a Windows operating system was present on the computer. I assume it had to do with the way my USB-bootable drive was originally configured, but I'm not sure though). So, I believe I have installed Ubuntu over the Windows and the Windows, I think, has pretty much been wiped out. There were two partitions there: C, with the Windows itself and another one, D, with all my data.

Here are my questions:

1. Do you think I have permanently lost all my data that was stored on disk D?
2. If not, is there any possibility that the data could be recovered?

I can easily adjust the level of brightness with the function keys while I'm actively working in the OS, but it resets itself back to full brightness after every reboot which, of course, is something I don't want. I would like to be able to have my latest adjustments automatically saved for me so that I don't have to tinker with them every time I boot up my PC.

Version of Ubuntu installed is 14.04.3 LTS