Daniel Rosehill's questions

I'm currently recording a video with two microphones attached to my computer (OS: Ubuntu 20.10).

There's the microphone that I want to monitor (a USB podcasting mic) and the built-in microphone to my webcam that I don't need to monitor and is just part of the webcam.

When I open up Pulseaudio, I can see levels for both mics and use them to record etc.

However, when I load module-loopback I am only able to see a loopback playback output for one of the two microphones (which, unfortunately, is the webcam mic that I don't want to monitor).

If I disconnect the webcam then the loopback feels falls back automatically to the podcasting mic. But I need to record with the webcam and monitor with the podcasting mic - so this doesn't help me much.

Is there some way to get a separate loopback channel for each recording input so that I can listen to the one that I want to?

Thank you!

I upgraded to 20.04 LTS about a week ago and have been experiencing very laggy performance since.

There seems to be a slight but perceptible lag with keyboard input and with general performance (moving between tabs in my browser etc).

I'm running the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Windforce OC 4G as my GPU.

And I'm using the following NVIDIA driver: nvidia-driver-440 (proprietary, tested) automatically installed during installation.

Desktop environment: LXDE.

How can I go about diagnosing whether this is an NVIDIA driver issue, a hardware issue, or something else?

I've been having a fairly longstanding problem that is now preventing me from installing google-drive-ocamlfuse.

When any CLI tries to run xdg-open URL it is not able to open the link in a webbrowser.

I can replicate the bug myself:

Yields:

I'm running Ubuntu 19.10 with LXDE.

ETA: Looks like an LXDE-specific issue. As a workaround I was able to log back in under GNOME and xdg-open functions as expected.

Any help appreciated!

I am involved in producing a podcast which I upload to LinkedIn.

Typically, I design covert art for 1080p and add that and the audio as tracks in OpenShot and then convert to a video format.

Is there an easier or CLI-based way to do this?

I'm instituting some New Year's resolutions around productivity.

One of those is to limit the frequency at which I check my email — and other communications channels.

I primarily use Rambox for this purpose.

I am looking for a productivity app which limits access to programs to either:

a) Certain times of the day
b) A cumulative period per day (e.g., one hour in a 24 hour period).

I've checked out some of the parental control tools but clearly these are intended for a slightly different use-case.

Does any program exist of this nature or is developing one — or developing self-control — my best bet?

Thank you in advance!

The shift + 3 combination on my keyboard layout (Irish English, en_IE) by default gives the British currency symbol (£). Unfortunately there's no easy combination to give a hashtag as far as I can tell.

What's the easiest way of remapping the Sterling symbol to give a hashtag?

I'm looking to take a whole system backup and store it on S3. Something that could be good enough to restore my entire system. But I've been told that using dd/rsync to capture the root directory will save a lot of extraneous files that I wouldn't need to restore the system.

In the event that I had to reply on this backup, I would need to restore:

• The home directory
• All installed programs
• All customizations throughout the system, such as edits to the Openbox configuration file, etc

The command I see recommended here is:

sudo rsync -aAXv / --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} /mnt

Is it possible to go lighter than that?

I'm having problems with my second Kingston SSD in the past few years.

The folks here have raised the possibility that I might need to update the firmware.

I'm about to buy a new SSD and reinstall the whole system, so it's worth a shot.

I see that Kingston does maintain an SSD Manager but that it's only available for Windows. I had no luck using Wine and can't currently get a Windows 10 ISO to load onto VMWare.

Does anybody know of any other way to upgrade the firmware?

SSD Manager - kingston.com

Hi folks,

I tried to upgrade from (Lubuntu) 18.04 to 19.04 over the weekend.

The upgrade didn't go as planned - the system wouldn't boot - so I decided to do a fresh install of Ubuntu 19.04 (I figured that as Lubuntu is no longer supporting LXDE, which was my main reason for using it, that it's time I found another distro).

I spent a day installing my programs only to begin seeing the dreaded busybox/intrafms messages at boot.

This happened with my previous SSD, although as I started running fsck on the live system when it began happening, this was probably the explanation. Eventually, even that stopped working, but as running fsck manually at every second boot wasn't a solution for me, I decided to buy a new disk.

In this case and the previous one, the SSDs started malfunctioning within a year. I don't dual boot, use the default swap setup, and don't generally forcibly turn the machine off. And I know for certain that I've been careful never to run fsck on the live system this time.

What gives?

Does Ubuntu simply fry SSDs?

Could I be getting lightning damage (there are only very occasional storms where I live, but the machine isn't on a surge protector)?

I never had this problem on my old (HDD) desktop or laptops.

TIA for anybody with thoughts to offer!

I boot to Virtualbox and get a totally black screen that's impossible to navigate.

Tried installing and reinstalling (from the Oracle Virtualbox website).

Anybody have any ideas how to fix this?

Window manager also look strange (I'm on Lubuntu 18.04)

I use Lubuntu 18.04.

I'm trying to assign my keypad delete key to em dash permanently.

AutoKey-GTK doesn't seem to be able to handle this for some reason.

The xmodmap command works, but I'm having difficulty getting it to execute at startup to make it permanent.

I've tried (all without success):

• Adding em dash as a phrase in AutoKey-GTK
• Adding the xmodmap command to the Lubuntu startup programs GUI
• Adding the command to the above as a bash script.
• Creating .Xinitrc and .Xmodmap files as described by another poster here.
• Adding it to the default applications list with a 15 second execution delay.
• Creating a desktop launcher and adding that to the 'autostart' folder.
• Adding the command script to the crontab under @reboot and running every two minutes.

So far nothing has worked.

The command is simply:

xmodmap -e "keycode 91 = emdash"

Anybody have any suggestions?

I bought a USB numberpad with the idea of programming some Autokey macros onto it.

Using xev, however, I see that the system does not recognize any difference between its keys and those on my main board.

Is there any way of assigning separate keys to the numberic USB board so that I can assign macros there? If so, which programs do I need (xmodmap, etc)?

Could hardware such as this work (they all seem to be Windows-only)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Expertkeys-EK-20-programmable-keypad-keyboard-x/dp/B00JR4WVMA/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1540900344&sr=8-9&keywords=programmable+keypad

Do they exist?

If so, does anybody have a link?

Just bought two from eBay and neither works.

I'm trying to disable wake-on-mouse from suspend and not having much success. As an alternative I attempted to increase the pointerhysteresis variable in the Xscreensaver configuration file as others suggested. However, no matter what I set it to it does not appear to make a differenence - the screensaver is still very sensitive to mouse movement and will wake at the tiniest poke.
Does anybody know why this might not be working?

I see that this has been asked before, but not for several years.

Is there any way to virtualize iOS on Ubuntu?

I'm doing purchasing research to buy a new laptop.

I want to connect two external monitors.

Every laptop I've seen contains one HDMI port, so that's one covered.

Some devices also have VGA, but they naturally tend to be a little bit outdated.

Which of the following is most reliable on Ubuntu, with adapters, for adding an additional external display?

• USB-C (I've read that there are problems)
• USB 3.0
• DisplayLink

Thanks in advance!

My package management system appears to be broken.

It looks to me as if the cause is the proprietary NVIDIA driver for my graphics card (nvidia-driver-390, proprietary, tested), but when I try to revert to the default X.Org X Server, whenever I go back into 'Software & Updates' no change has occurred.

This is the output I receive when I try to install a package:

 sudo apt-get install birdfont
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt --fix-broken install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 birdfont : Depends: libxmlbird1 but it is not going to be installed
            Depends: fonts-roboto but it is not going to be installed
            Recommends: unicode-data but it is not going to be installed
 **libnvidia-ifr1-390 : Depends: libnvidia-gl-390 but it is not going to be installed**
 libnvidia-ifr1-390:i386 : Depends: libnvidia-gl-390:i386 but it is not going to be installed
 **nvidia-driver-390 : Depends: libnvidia-gl-390 (= 390.48-0ubuntu3) but it is not going to be installed**
                     Recommends: libnvidia-gl-390:i386 (= 390.48-0ubuntu3)
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt --fix-broken install' with no packages (or specify a solution)

Output of sudo apt-get install -f

    sudo apt-get install -f
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  clamav-base clamav-freshclam lib32gcc1 libc6-i386 libclamav7 libgsoap-2.8.60 libllvm3.9 libqt5opengl5
  libtext-csv-perl libtext-csv-xs-perl libtfm1 libvncserver1 xserver-xorg-legacy
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following additional packages will be installed:
  libnvidia-gl-390 libnvidia-gl-390:i386
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libnvidia-gl-390 libnvidia-gl-390:i386
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 37 not upgraded.
3 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 29.1 MB of archives.
After this operation, 147 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Y
Get:1 http://il.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/restricted i386 libnvidia-gl-390 i386 390.48-0ubuntu3 [14.9 MB]
Get:2 http://il.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/restricted amd64 libnvidia-gl-390 amd64 390.48-0ubuntu3 [14.3 MB]
Fetched 29.1 MB in 9s (3,325 kB/s)                                                                      
(Reading database ... 253938 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libnvidia-gl-390_390.48-0ubuntu3_i386.deb ...
diversion of /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libGL.so to /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libGL.so.distrib by nvidia-340
dpkg-divert: error: mismatch on package
  when removing 'diversion of /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libGL.so by libnvidia-gl-390'
  found 'diversion of /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libGL.so to /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libGL.so.distrib by nvidia-340'
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-gl-390_390.48-0ubuntu3_i386.deb (--unpack):
 new libnvidia-gl-390:i386 package pre-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 2
Preparing to unpack .../libnvidia-gl-390_390.48-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb ...
diversion of /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1 to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1.distrib by nvidia-340
dpkg-divert: error: mismatch on package
  when removing 'diversion of /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1 by libnvidia-gl-390'
  found 'diversion of /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1 to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1.distrib by nvidia-340'
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-gl-390_390.48-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb (--unpack):
 new libnvidia-gl-390:amd64 package pre-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-gl-390_390.48-0ubuntu3_i386.deb
 /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-gl-390_390.48-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

`

**sudo apt -fix-broken install**
sudo apt --fix-broken install
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  clamav-base clamav-freshclam lib32gcc1 libc6-i386 libclamav7 libgsoap-2.8.60
  libllvm3.9 libqt5opengl5 libtext-csv-perl libtext-csv-xs-perl libtfm1
  libvncserver1 xserver-xorg-legacy
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following additional packages will be installed:
  libnvidia-gl-390 libnvidia-gl-390:i386
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libnvidia-gl-390 libnvidia-gl-390:i386
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 37 not upgraded.
3 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/29.1 MB of archives.
After this operation, 147 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Y
(Reading database ... 253938 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libnvidia-gl-390_390.48-0ubuntu3_i386.deb ...
diversion of /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libGL.so to /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libGL.so.distrib by nvidia-340
dpkg-divert: error: mismatch on package
  when removing 'diversion of /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libGL.so by libnvidia-gl-390'
  found 'diversion of /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libGL.so to /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libGL.so.distrib by nvidia-340'
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-gl-390_390.48-0ubuntu3_i386.deb (--unpack):
 new libnvidia-gl-390:i386 package pre-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 2
Preparing to unpack .../libnvidia-gl-390_390.48-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb ...
diversion of /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1 to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1.distrib by nvidia-340
dpkg-divert: error: mismatch on package
  when removing 'diversion of /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1 by libnvidia-gl-390'
  found 'diversion of /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1 to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so.1.distrib by nvidia-340'
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-gl-390_390.48-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb (--unpack):
 new libnvidia-gl-390:amd64 package pre-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-gl-390_390.48-0ubuntu3_i386.deb
 /var/cache/apt/archives/libnvidia-gl-390_390.48-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I've tried the recommended command but the problem hasn't been resolved.

Any ideas to help troubleshoot?