G. He's questions

I had an HP LaserJet 3030 printer connected to an Ubuntu box. It worked fine with 11.10. I was able to print from Ubuntu as well as from Windows and Mac from the home network.

About a month or so ago, I upgraded 11.10 to 12.04, then things started to falling apart. My Windows 7 laptop couldn't print to the printer any more.

Today, I installed many updates on 12.04, hoping that would fix the printing problem. Unfortunately, it made the situation much worse. Now not only my Windows 7 laptop won't print, my XP desktop won't print either.

Every time I print something from the Windows computer, the Ubuntu box logs an error message in /var/log/samba/log.'machineName' as:

_spoolss_OpenPrinterEx: Cannot open a printer handle for printer \\server.  

It is interesting that it uses the server name as the printer, not the \\server\xyzprinter as the printer name.

Anyone had a similar problem? Anyway to work around the problem?

The laptop is dual booting with windows 7 and ubuntu 11.10. For 11.10 to boot, I had to add 'nolapic' in GRUB boot options.

I downloaded 12.04LTS LiveCD yesterday and made a CD and a bootable USB stick. With both USB and LiveCD, occasionally I can boot into 12.04. But many times, the boot process stuck at some point.

For USB boot, sometime it works. But other times, it seems to stuck right after seeing the message:

NMI watchdog enabled.
takes one hw-pmu counted
[0.408590] #2

The number in [] changes. Some times it stuck at #2, and sometimes at #3.

For LiveCD boot, sometime it works. But when it stuck, it stuck at different places. At times, the boot process go directly to a blank screen with a blink '_' at up left corner. Sometime it went a bit further, after showing options to try/install ubuntu then stuck with a blank screen with blink '_'.

Anything I can do to get around of this?

At this point, octave 3.2 is the version available for directly installation in ubuntu 12.04. But latest stable octave is 3.6.1 now.

Will Octave 3.6.1 be packaged for ubuntu 12.04?

ubuntu 11.10 32bit. Setup a dovecot imap server. Using Thunderbird on a different ubuntu machine (64bit) to access imap server. Everything else is fine, except I can not compact the deleted email in inbox, which is stored at /var/mail/username. Checking mail.log and I see this error message:

Apr  3 00:10:11 autumn dovecot: imap(username): Error: file_dotlock_create(/var/mail/username) failed: Permission denied (euid=1000(username) egid=1000(username) missing +w perm: /var/mail, euid is not dir owner) (set mail_privileged_group=mail)

what is wrong with the permission? Here are the permissions for the relevant files:

$ ls -ld /var/mail
drwxrwsr-x 2 mail mail 4096 2012-04-02 23:36 /var/mail

$ ls -l /var/mail/username
-rw------- 1 username mail 417 2012-04-02 23:36 /var/mail/username

Anyone knows what's going on here?

Possible Duplicate:
How to change files permissions from a different hard drive?

I have an USB3.0 external hard disk, partitioned to 3 NTFS partitions. When I plug the hard disk in, the 3 partitions automatically mounted under /media. So far so good. I can read and write to files, or mkdir, etc on these partitions. But I can't do chmod/chown on any of the files/directories on these partitions. The owner:group always myself, and the mode are always 700 for directories and 600 for files.

I have another partition on internal harddisk also mounted. That partition works fine. I looked the output of mount command, the only difference between mount options is that there is one extra 'default_permissions' on the external hard disks.

Anyway I can set the owner:group and mode on these files and directories.

Newly installed ubuntu 11.10 on a new Asus U46E laptop. /proc/cpuinfo correctly identified the cpu but shows only one core:

processor   : 0
vendor_id   : GenuineIntel
cpu family  : 6
model       : 42
model name  : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2640M CPU @ 2.80GHz
stepping    : 7
cpu MHz     : 800.000
cache size  : 4096 KB
physical id : 0
siblings    : 1
core id     : 0
cpu cores   : 1
apicid      : 0
initial apicid  : 0
fpu     : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level : 13
wp      : yes
flags       : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc up arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt aes xsave avx lahf_lm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dts tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid
bogomips    : 5587.63
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

I search here and found the answer to one post suggesting remove boot parameter 'nolapic'. However, on my particular laptop, ubuntu won't boot without this nolapic parameter. Is there anyway for ubuntu correly utility the full cpu power?

I read other people's blog showing as easily as sudo apt-get install mt-daapd. But when I do that, I got an error message E: unable to locate package mt-daapd.

Could someone point me to the right direction?

I have a 750GB hard disk with Windows 7 installed. So I shrunk the C: drive to about 80 GB, created two more partitions, one for data (about 615GB), one for ubuntu (30GB) (extended partition). I ran gparted, created a 8.5 GB swap partition inside ubuntu partition, and left whatever to ubuntu root partition. So I went to install ubuntu. After a few tries, everything worked. But now, I noticed some puzzling facts. Here are the output of a few commands:

$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda7              5333936   4472688    590300  89% /
udev                   4043640         4   4043636   1% /dev
tmpfs                  1621024       864   1620160   1% /run
none                      5120         0      5120   0% /run/lock
none                   4052552       200   4052352   1% /run/shm
/dev/sda4            599041020 213046820 385994200  36% /home

$ sudo parted -l
Model: ATA TOSHIBA MK7559GS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 750GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system     Flags
 1      1049kB  26.8GB  26.8GB  primary   fat32           hidden, lba
 2      26.8GB  105GB   78.4GB  primary   ntfs            boot
 3      105GB   137GB   31.5GB  extended
 5      105GB   114GB   8913MB  logical   linux-swap(v1)
 7      114GB   120GB   5549MB  logical   ext4
 8      120GB   128GB   8496MB  logical   linux-swap(v1)
 6      128GB   137GB   8496MB  logical   linux-swap(v1)
 4      137GB   750GB   613GB   primary   ntfs

In df output, / has only about 5GB, and in parted output, there are two more partions (number 6 and 8) of 8GB each. I don't remember I ever created them. What are they? Are these disk space being wasted? How can I reclaim them?

Help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

I'm trying to build Octave 3.6.1 on my 64bit ubuntu 11.10. I was able to fix all other warning messages from configure except this one: 'fontconfig library not found'. I tried to install libfontconfig, but apt-get uses libfontconfig1 instead of libfontconfig. How can I let configure to use libfontconfig1 instead?

Thanks.

I used to be able to search for terminal in 'Dash Home' and brings up terminal. However, this way doesn't work any more. 'Dash Home' does not even let me search for 'terminal'.

One thing, I have my home directory on a NTFS partition and shared with a Windows 7 dual boot. I don't know if Windows 7 caused the trouble.

Is there anyway I can get back 'terminal'? Without terminal, life is miserable.