Brydon Gibson's questions

I installed ubuntu over windows a while ago on a laptop. I haven't needed windows for the past 6 months but I finally need to boot into it. In grub, I selected the Windows 10 option, and windows went through its bootloader and eventually hung. On restarting the machine grub went into rescue mode, and I went to a live CD to rescue.

/boot is completely broken. I can't even rm it, here's what it looks like:

ls -l /
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root root        7 Dev 27 13:15 bin -> usr/bin
d?????????    ? ?    ?           ?            ? boot
....

rm /boot gives me cannot remove 'boot': Bad message. grub-install can't find the /boot directory to fix grub.

Is there any way out of this? Fortunately it looks like the rest of the filesystem is intact so worst case I can backup and restore, but I would like to avoid if possible

There are many questions here asking how to install gcc 5.4.0. The ones that I have found have answers saying to just sudo apt install gcc-5 and then run the appropriate update-alternatives. That works, however gcc-5 installs gcc 5.5, and I need to install gcc 5.4.0.

Is there a way to specify to apt a particular version?

I frequently have things I need to do in a fresh context to keep from messing up my workflow. Usually I open a fresh terminal, do whatever, and then by the end of the day I have a bunch of single-command terminal windows open.

Sometimes I remember to add && exit on the end of my command, but sometimes I don't.

Is there a way to run a single command via a hotkey? Mainly useful for umount /media/[tab][tab], but I could find other uses as well. Autocomplete would definitely be an asset.

I'm trying to parse contents of an HTML file to scrape a download directory, however I've modified it to a MWE that reproduces my issue:

sed -e 's|\(href\)|\1|' index.html

Prints the entirety of index.html. I was originally thinking that it was an issue with my expression, but this very basic expression proves that wrong.

The same happens if I remove -e or if I add g at the end.

It's been a while since I've done sed, am I doing something wrong here? Is sed getting confused with the characters in an html file?

I have a dell thunderbolt usb-C dock, and it only appears to work on boot. I have a display, keyboard and mouse plugged in.

If I boot with the thunderbolt plugged, all is well, but if I hotplug, I get display flicker and then nothing.

I'm using kernel 4.13.0-41 on ubuntu 16.4

udevadm monitor sees it:

KERNEL[477.988798] change   /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/ACPI0003:00/power_supply/AC (power_supply)
UDEV  [477.997665] change   /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/ACPI0003:00/power_supply/AC (power_supply)
KERNEL[478.005687] change   /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/PNP0C0A:00/power_supply/BAT0 (power_supply)
UDEV  [478.006458] change   /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/PNP0C0A:00/power_supply/BAT0 (power_supply)
KERNEL[484.516809] change   /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/PNP0C0A:00/power_supply/BAT0 (power_supply)
UDEV  [484.517543] change   /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/PNP0C0A:00/power_supply/BAT0 (power_supply)
KERNEL[487.952109] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1/card1-DP-6 (drm)
KERNEL[487.952169] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)
UDEV  [487.953432] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1/card1-DP-6 (drm)
UDEV  [487.953966] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)
KERNEL[487.954831] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)
UDEV  [487.955564] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)
KERNEL[487.958190] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/i2c-21/i2c-dev/i2c-21 (i2c-dev)
KERNEL[487.958204] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/i2c-21 (i2c)
KERNEL[487.958233] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1/card1-DP-7 (drm)
KERNEL[487.958250] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)
KERNEL[487.958272] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1/card1-DP-8 (drm)
KERNEL[487.958287] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)
KERNEL[487.958301] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)
UDEV  [487.958931] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/i2c-21/i2c-dev/i2c-21 (i2c-dev)
UDEV  [487.959240] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/i2c-21 (i2c)
UDEV  [487.960662] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1/card1-DP-7 (drm)
UDEV  [487.961160] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)
UDEV  [487.962009] add      /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1/card1-DP-8 (drm)
UDEV  [487.962378] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)
UDEV  [487.962715] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)
KERNEL[489.087740] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)
UDEV  [489.088473] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)
KERNEL[490.251883] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1/card1-eDP-1/intel_backlight (backlight)
UDEV  [490.252773] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1/card1-eDP-1/intel_backlight (backlight)
KERNEL[499.164089] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)
UDEV  [499.164857] change   /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card1 (drm)

And the mouse and keyboard show up properly in lsusb, but they aren't useable.

modprobe thunderbolt returns nothing and makes no change.

It looks like USB-C hotplug support was backported from RHEL into the mainline kernel quite a while ago - so I don't think that's the issue, I have no idea what else could be causing it. Any ideas as to why I can't use these devices, even though they come up, only when they're hotplugged?

I'm trying to do some work on an image for a raspberry pi, but I don't have access to the pi itself, just the SD card that runs the OS.

I'd like to chroot onto the pi's SD card (mainly to run some pip commands), but I'm getting errors with bash :

chroot: failed to run command ‘/bin/bash’: Exec format error

I assume this is because the programs are compiled for the pi's processor and not mine.

The only thought I have is changing the $PATH to point to my /bin, but I can't imagine that being good practice or safe in any way

Is there a way to make this work?

I have a very specific kernel structure on an sd card I'd like to copy and send to a friend.

I know I can simply dd the entire SD card, but the kernel is ~2GB, which wastes the other 14GB of the disk.

Is there a way to dd just the important parts?

I know I can also dd the individual partitions, but this requires setting up an equivalent partition table on the other side, so I'd prefer to do this in a way that requires only a single dd to the child disk, regardless of the complexity of creating the parent.

I take my course notes in LaTeX and I have a base folder style I set up that contains an intro page and a lecture stream. In this case it's trivial to create but sometimes the situation could be more complex.

Is there any way to put a folder into the templates folder and create that folder? If I create the folder when I go to create document, it lets me go into the folder and select documents, but I can't create the folder.

Is there any way to set the folder as a creatable file? Maybe if I don't have permission to read its contents?