Christian's questions

I can update my system using apt and the Software Updater application on my Ubuntu 21.04 laptop. But I can not longer use the Ubuntu Software application. It keeps telling me "Go online to check for updates" and the update button top left is grayed out. I can install applications with Ubuntu Software. It's only checking for updates that doesn't work. I have checked repositories, even switched to another mirror, but Ubuntu Software still claims I am not online. No other applications have problems with internet connection either.

What can I do to convince Ubuntu Software that I am online so I can use it for update checks? It also checks for firmware updates so I would like to have it working. See screenshot for the error I am getting The Network Settings button does nothing:

There's some other oddities going on with Ubuntu Software application also. If I knew how to reset this application (which is a snap I guess?) to default I'm sure I would solve the problem above also.

I may have missed something here, but after I upgraded to 21.04 I randomly get locked into "Activities/Overview" after I press Super Key. I can still open and close applications but I am not able to get back to normal desktop and end up having to log out and in again. It may be that I hit another key in addition to the Super Key thus triggering it, but I am not able to reproduce it, it happens randomly, and I am not able to get out if it without logging out.

Am I missing a key combo here and this is a feature, or is it a bug, and what could I do to prevent it from happening or how do I get out of it if/when it does?

The 'Ubuntu Software' application tells me me I have a firmware update available (screenshot below). I have installed many of those on this laptop without problems but this time when I click "Install" the update notification disappears and then shows up again as if I haven't done anything. I can keep clicking 'Install' but it keeps coming back after a couple of seconds. I then thought I would reboot and maybe the update would install before boot as it has in the past. Nothing, just a normal boot, but I notice a lockup/pause for a couple of seconds during shutdown I haven't noticed before.

I also tried using fwupd but got lost since there's one snap version and one deb version available. The snap version won't run and give me a cryptic error while the deb version has the same problem as 'Ubuntu Software'. It tells me I have an update, I choose to install it and it's being downloaded. Now I am getting a reboot y/n option I do not get from 'Ubuntu Software' and I choose reboot y. I reboot. Same thing, nothing other than the pause during shutdown. I boot normally again and still have the same update available right after I log in to my user account.

How can I fix this and get the firmware update installed? Annoying to get the update available over and over and not be able to install it. This is the update in question:

I have a pair of Jabra Evolve2 85. I connect them wirelessly to a little USB-C dongle plugged into my Ubuntu 20.10 laptop. The headphones are recognized as a USB device and can be selected in sound output settings. They work just fine, but only until I open Sound settings. Then they immediately switch to mono and poorer sound quality and when I do the left <-> right test it's mono. As soon as I close Sound settings the headphones automatically switches back to stereo high quality sound. They also switch to this mono mode when I do Skype and Zoom calls. I seem to remember that when I use bluetooth headphones there's two modes in settings to choose from, one for chat and such, and one for high quality music. Maybe Ubuntu gets "confused" when I use these hybrid headphones that connect to a dongle which again is connected to the laptop? Things seem to work fine but this switch to mono when opening sound settings is very confusing.

I upgraded my Thinkpad laptop from Ubuntu 20.04 to 20.10. All went well. However, there's now firmware updates available but when I try to apply them I get an error saying:

Unable to update "System Firmware": missing signed bootloader for secure boot: /usr/libexec/fwupd/efi/-fwupdx64.efi.signed can not be found

How do I fix this so I can update firmware? Shouldn't this be taken care of during the system upgrade?

I have a couple of systemd timers which are run monthly:

OnCalendar=monthly

However, they will run at the exact same time of day. How can I set them to run monthly at, let's say, 2 am?

I run Ubuntu 19.10 installed on ZFS through the new ZFS install option on 19.10. This is on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th which is in heavy daily use. No dualboot so it's Ubuntu all the time. The laptop has a SSD, and as I understand it fstrim doesn't read and work on ZFS so I either have to run on trim for my pools or schedule trim with systemd timers or cron. I have used btrfs in the past and there I ran trim on a schedule since it slowed me down a little to enable discard (trim). But on ZFS enabling trim doesn't seem to give me a performance hit at all so I was wondering if I still should set up trim on a weekly or monthly basis?

I'm running Ubuntu 19.10 on ZFS and all works good. I know that Ubuntu has fstrim scheduled on a weekly basis by default but ZFS also supports trim through '/sbin/zpool trim [pool]'. What's the difference between them and should I schedule both to trim my SSD?

I installed Ubuntu 18.10 on a laptop. When I opened Gparted I saw this little partition and do not know what it is (see image). Gparted also has a warning about it:

Unable to read the contents of this file system! Because of this some operations may be unavailable. The cause might be a missing software package. The following list of software packages is required for fat32 file system support: dosfstools, mtools.

fdisk has it as:

/dev/nvme0n1p1    2048       6143       4096     2M BIOS boot

What is this partition, why is it there and do I need it? I have never noticed such a partition before.

Update: I find this hard to understand even after having read up on it. I add my disk layout here:

sudo parted -l /dev/sda
Model: SAMSUNG MZSLW1T0HMLH-000L1 (nvme)
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 1024GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name  Flags
 1      1049kB  3146kB  2097kB  fat32              bios_grub
 2      3146kB  543MB   540MB   fat32              boot, esp
 3      543MB   1024GB  1024GB  btrfs

I guess I have a gpt partition so therefore I have the bios_grub partition? This is a relatively new install of 18.10 and I wonder why the partition table is gpt?

I'm on Ubuntu 18.10 and keyboard shortcuts containing the Shift key aren't working, "not working" meaning Shift is ignored. They are not working in applications with shortcuts containing Shift either like the Vivaldi browser. So if I do Shift+Ctrl+End I get the action for Ctrl+End. Shift works normally when typing.

I'm on a Thinkpad T460S which otherwise works perfectly.

I would like to have a drive mounted during boot, but only if it's available. I have an entry for it now in fstab, but if it's not available boot halts. Is there a way to have to format the fstab line so that the drive mounts if available and ignores it if it isn't?

How can I get my Bluetooth headphone to connect automatically when I turn them on? They do that on KDE Plasma and with my phone, but not on Ubuntu 18.04. They are paired and working, but I have to open Bluetooth settings every time and connect them.

How do I get Hexchat to show a system tray icon on Ubuntu 18.04? I have tried to launch with 'hexchat --minimize=2', and tried to find a way to enable the system tray in Settings -> Preferences -> Alerts where the option should be available.It is not. What am I missing? All other chat clients I use (Skype, Signal and Slack) have working system tray icons.

I'm using a VPN client which adds two name servers to /etc/resolv.conf. All my connections are managed by Network-Manager.

I have to use this VPN client for my work VPN but after Ubuntu went to systemd-resolved in 16.10 I am having problems with my connection and DNS. Looks like systemd-resolved changes /etc/resolv.conf back to default name servers for some reason which makes internal pages not resolve. I looked into this some more and ended up replacing resolvconf with openresolv. That helped a lot, but still systemd-resolved resets /etc/resolv.conf after the VPN has been up for a while.

It could be just as the connection is up or after a few minutes or sometimes not at all. I then disabled systemd-resolved and the systemd resolvconf.service and only run openresolv. It all works well it seems.

However, this is all very confusing. Is there a reason for using systemd-resolved with one of the others? It was enabled in Ubuntu 16.10 so I thought there must be a reason for it but it seems to cause a fight over /etc/resolv.conf.

It would be great if I could just run operesolv and get this explained. I have done quite a bit of reading on it but I still do not understand why /etc/resolv.conf is managed like it is, only that when I use systemd for it I can't use my VPN client.

I have run a distro which doesn't have syslog nor cron installed by default. I felt lost at first, but when I learned how to read and work with the journal and systemd timers I found I didn't really need syslog and even cron. Ubuntu uses both the syslog and the journal and some timers and a few cron jobs. How would I go about removing system logging and even cron on Ubuntu without breaking something? I'm not asking out of necessity at this point, but rather to get rid of processes I do not not need.

In Ubuntu 16.10 I am getting the following error messages when I do kernel related updates:

W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/kbl_guc_ver9_14.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/bxt_guc_ver8_7.bin for module i915

Everything seems to work on my Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro, but it would be good to know what this means and if I need to worry about it.

I am using a laptop with a HiDPI screen. Everything scales except for two apps. One seems to be GTK2 based and the other Qt5 based but where all the libraries it uses comes in the package (Viber for Linux. Both of them are basically useless since I can't see the written characters since they are too small. Is there anything I can do to get these two applications to scale like all my other applications do? I'm running straight Ubuntu 16.04 x64.

I am having an annoying problem in Gnome/Gnome-Shell. After some time, like an hour or two, suddenly windows starts moving slower and jerky. When I drag them around they move in steps instead of smoothly. Same thing with maximize and restore, the animations are are jerky and significantly slower. It's like the CPU or graphics card is throttled but I do not see any indication that is the case, and I do not have any process hogging CPU or memory either.

All applications run normally as long as I do not move them around. I have also disabled all extensions. If I restart GNOME with Alt-F2 r everything is back to normal. For a while that is. I do not have that problem with Unity, but I prefer GNOME so I would like to find out what is going on. Ideas?

Is there a way to enable tap to click for the Thinkpad trackpoint using systemd in 15.04? I know sensitivity can be adjusted, but I have not seen a way to enable tap to click. There's instructions here on how to adjust sensitivity under systemd:

Increase Trackpoint Sensititvity with SystemD (Ubuntu 15.04 or later)

I've not found out how to enable tap to click though

I upgraded to to Graphics Installer 1.0.6 on my Ubuntu 14.04 and installed the drivers using the Intel Graphics Installer. The laptop is Intel Ivybridge powered with Intel HD graphics. It Optimus but I have disabled the Nvidia card in bios. The Intel Graphics Installer installs the package i915-3.15-3.13-dkms.deb which I assume is the updated driver. It causes a bunch of error messages when I boot. Here are the relevant errors from dmesg when I boot:

[    7.206151] drm: module verification failed: signature and/or  required key missing - tainting kernel
[    7.208045] drm: module has bad taint, not creating trace events
[    7.336470] fb: conflicting fb hw usage inteldrmfb vs VESA VGA - removing generic driver
[    7.393854] [drm] Supports vblank timestamp caching Rev 2 (21.10.2013)
[    7.393855] [drm] Driver supports precise vblank timestamp query.
[    7.393921] vgaarb: device changed decodes: PCI:0000:00:02.0,olddecodes=io+mem,decodes=io+mem:owns=io+mem
[    7.505798] [drm] GMBUS [i915 gmbus dpb] timed out, falling back to bit banging on pin 5
[    7.507233] init: Failed to obtain startpar-bridge instance: Unknown parameter: INSTANCE
[    7.944183] [drm:cpt_serr_int_handler] *ERROR* PCH transcoder A FIFO underrun
[    8.368479] i915 0000:00:02.0: fb0: inteldrmfb frame buffer device
[    8.368480] i915 0000:00:02.0: registered panic notifier
[    8.818416] [drm] Enabling RC6 states: RC6 on, RC6p on, RC6pp off

What could the problem be and will it affect performance? I tried to remove the package and the errors went away but I'm then running and older driver I assume?