SteveInBavaria's questions

Since upgrading to 24.04 I have been suffering from screen "Flickering" or "Tearing". This happens, or perhaps is more noticeable, when playing Chess or Sudoku where the mouse doesn't move for quite long periods, moving the mouse stops the flickering. The flickering is always accompanied with an error in the Gnome-logs;

"i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] ERROR CPU pipe A FIFO underrun"

I am using Wayland on a Linux only laptop, but I have been using Wayland since 22.04 without encountering this issue until upgrading to 24.04. I have tried using different refresh rates (48.07, 59.93 and 60Hz) all to no avail.

Ideas on how to fix this would be most welcome as my chess score is going rapidly down ;-)

I am using Ubuntu 23.10 and do not have a CD/DVD reader/writer on my laptop. I have downloaded a bootable ISO from Linux Welt and want to burn this onto a USB stick but I cannot find a GUI that can do this. I have tried Startup Disk Creator, Brasero and k3b but they all seem want to write the ISO onto a CD/DVD. How can I write the bootable ISO onto the USB stick?

I am using Ubuntu 23.10 and I would like to set an application, in my case CuteCom Serial Monitor, to be always on top. At the moment if my IDE is fullscreen I have to launch CuteCom from the dash and then after I return to the IDE and make some changes I have to relaunch Cutecom from the dash again.

If this is possible I can imagine it being useful for other applications too.

I have today upgraded to Ubuntu 23.10 from 23.04 and the side buttons on my Logitech "Logi" M650 mouse no longer work. My 23.04 installation used Wayland as does the new 23.10. I cannot remember how I set up the side buttons in 23.04.

Can anyone show me how to set up the Logi side (extra) buttons in 23.10?

I have upgraded from 21.04 to 21.10 having first switched off my gnome extensions as I have had problems upgrading with Gnome extensions switched on in the past. The upgrade seems to have worked ok but my extensions are no longer available. The Tweak tool no longer supports the extensions and https://extensions.gnome.org/local/ shows that a lot of extensions are now "Out of Date" due to 21.10 using Gnome 4. The extensions that are not greyed out and marked "Out of Date" can be switched on with the toggle but do not actually appear on the desktop, and the next time I look on https://extensions.gnome.org/local/ they are switched off again.

Is there any way to use Gnome extensions in Ubuntu 21.10/Gnome 4? I need some of them for my daily work and I haven't the time to discover other ways to do what I have used them for for years now. I'm afraid I'll have to revert back to 21.04 if Gnome extensions are gone for good in 21.10.

I upgraded to 20.04 from 19.10 a few weeks ago. Everything has been working fine except for a few teething problems I easily sorted out. I regularly update my system with sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade and since the last update some basic Gnome apps have been removed. For instance yesterday the gnome.logs app had gone and when a called it from the command line I got this message:

$ gnome-logs

Der Befehl 'gnome-logs' wurde nicht gefunden, kann aber installiert werden mit:

sudo snap install gnome-logs # version 3.34.0,  or sudo apt install gnome-logs # version 3.34.0-1ubuntu1

(The German reads "The command 'gnome-logs' was not found but can be installed with: .......)

I reinstalled it with sudo apt-get install gnome-logs and the version 3.34.0 was installed and works as it did previously.

Then today I needed to use the calculator, but that too had disappeared! And when I called it from the command line I got the same message to (re-)install with snap or apt.

Why are these often used apps being removed? Is it someone trying to get me to switch to using snap rather than apt or reminding me that the packages are available in snap?

Whatever the reason, trying to open often used apps only to find you have to re-install them is frustrating and subtracts from the pleasure of using Ubuntu.

If I were to install the same application both as a snap and using APT, how would I be able to call each one separately and how would I know which one was running?

I am not yet fully convinced that snap is best for the end-user and want to compare the performance of a few packages.

I am having problems streaming some TV sites (ITV Hub, BritBox) on Ubuntu 19.10 in Chrome. This is a recent problem that has only recently started, a few weeks ago there was no problem streaming these sites. I regularly update my system and if is therefore very likely that an update is responsible and I only noticed days or weeks later.

I have started to look at the possibility that Widevine DRM is resonsible after James Shade Ubuntu 19.10 some drm content not streaming noted that-.

The problem is the same in Firefox (72.0.1) and Chrome (79.0.3945.130) (with DRM enabled in both). I note that both ITVPlayer and BritBox are getting an error 400 from a call to itvpnp.live.ott.irdeto.com/Widevine/getlicense as the page loads (this returns with a successful 200 response in Windows). This was all working fine in December

I have looked at the folder /opt/google/chrome/WidevineCdm and found this manifest.json file.I notice that there is no Linux entry under "platforms-OS" surely there should be.

{
      "manifest_version": 2,
      "update_url": "https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx",
      "name": "WidevineCdm",
      "description": "Widevine Content Decryption Module",
      "version": "4.10.1610.0",
      "minimum_chrome_version": "68.0.3430.0",
      "x-cdm-module-versions": "4",
      "x-cdm-interface-versions": "10",
      "x-cdm-host-versions": "10",
      "x-cdm-codecs": "vp8,vp09,avc1,av01",
      "x-cdm-persistent-license-support": false,
      "x-cdm-supported-encryption-schemes": ["cenc","cbcs"],
      "icons": {
        "16": "imgs/icon-128x128.png",
        "128": "imgs/icon-128x128.png"
      },
      "platforms": [
        {
          "os": "win",
          "arch": "x86",
          "sub_package_path": "_platform_specific/win_x86/"
        },
        {
          "os": "win",
          "arch": "x64",
          "sub_package_path": "_platform_specific/win_x64/"
        },
        {
          "os": "mac",
          "arch": "x64",
          "sub_package_path": "_platform_specific/mac_x64/"
        }
      ]
    }

There is a file called "libwidevinecdm.so under /opt/google/chrome/WidevineCdm/_platform_specific/linux_x64 but I cannot read it.

I would really appreciate any help with this.

I am running Ubuntu 19.10 as the only OS on my laptop. Up until recently, that is a few days ago, I regularly watched ITVHub in the Chrome browser on my laptop.

Yesterday I tried to watch a programme only to get the warning that I needed to enable "Protected Content" in Chrome or "Digital Right Management (DRM) Content" in Firefox. I tried to stream the programme in Firefox but got the same warning. I checked and the options were enabled in the Chrome and Firefox browsers. I can stream the BBC iPlayer and All4, two other UK streaming sites without any problem.

I then tried streaming ITVHub using Chrome in my Android tablet and it worked perfectly.

I regularly update my Ubuntu OS and there was an update prior to this problem occuring. Because Chrome can stream ITVHub on my Android tablet but not on my Ubuntu laptop I suspect the problem may be an OS problem.

I have all of the ubuntu-restricted-extras etc installed and the ITVHub was working on my 19.10 OS until very recently.

Any ideas of what may be causing this?

Since upgrading to Ubuntu 19.10 I cannot save files and links to the desktop. With Ubuntu 19.04 I used a GNOME extension called "Desktop icons" to do this but it doesn't work in 19.10. I can't find anything in the setup or GNOME Tweaks to enable this. The file ~/Desktop exists and still contains the files and folders which were on my 19.04 desktop.

Out of interest, why is it nowadays regarded as a bad thing to save things on the desktop? I still find it useful to put stuff I'm either working on or use a lot there.

When running Ubuntu 19.10 on both Wayland and X11 I am still getting this "important" warning in gnome-logs:

gkr-pam: unable to locate daemon control file

Does anyone know what it means and what might be causing it?

Edit: I have just noticed that even after reformating the usb stick that in gparted there is a red circle with an exclamation mark and clicking on it brings up the warning.

plain floppy: device "/dev/sda" busy (Resource temporarily unavailable): Cannot initialize '::' mlabel: Cannot initialize drive

I reformatted the usb stick to FAT 32 via both gparted and Nautilus. How can I get rid of this message.

Is there an apt, apt-get or dpkg command or option that will enable me to list the installed packages into the main, restricted, universe and multiverse repositories they were installed from separately?

If not is there another way to list packages separately according to repositories?

I have a brand new laptop and running Ubuntu 18.10 on Wayland. Everything is working fine but I am keeping an eye on the logs. Today a new warning appeared:

Unrecoverable failure in required component org.gnome.Shell.desktop

What does this mean? There doesn't seem to be any problems at all with the laptop or with Gnome.

EDIT. Output of ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions requested below:

N8xxEZ:~$ ls -al ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
insgesamt 72
drwxrwxr-x 18  4096 Mär 21 08:51 .
drwx------  3  4096 Mär 21 18:21 ..
drwxrwxr-x  4  4096 Mär 21 08:51 activities-config@nls1729
drwxrwxr-x  7  4096 Mär 17 15:38 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x  5  4096 Mär 17 15:39 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x  4  4096 Mär 15 10:39 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x  5  4096 Mär 15 10:39 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x  3  4096 Mär 20 13:51 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x  6  4096 Mär 15 10:41 freon@UshakovVasilii_Github.yahoo.com
drwxrwxr-x  5  4096 Mär 20 13:41 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x  5  4096 Mär 15 10:44 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x  3  4096 Mär 15 20:00 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x  4  4096 Mär 16 03:20 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x  3  4096 Mär 17 15:38 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x  2  4096 Mär 17 15:53 [email protected]
drwxrwxr-x  2  4096 Mär 15 20:07 synaptic-button@fthx
drwxrwxr-x  5  4096 Mär 21 20:13 touchpad-indicator@orangeshirt
drwxr-xr-x  3  4096 Mär 15 11:48 [email protected]
N8xxEZ:~$ 

I noticed the following message in syslog:

Cannot access vdagent virtio channel /dev/virtio-ports/com.redhat.spice.0

I am running Ubuntu 18.10 on Wayland, so could I delete spice-vdagent? And if I did what effect would that have if I decided to run Ubuntu 18.10 under Xorg?

I have been having problems with Owncloud after upgrading my server to 18.04 so I decided to try Nextcloud with Mariadb following these instructions The command "sudo systemctl start mariadb" kept timing out so I gave up and decided to try again with Owncloud and mysql. But then whenever I tried to use "sudo mysql -u root -p" I got the message

ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) 

I discovered this was probably to do with Mariabd and so completely purged both mysql and Mariadb. Now when I try and re-install mysql I get the following message and after installation cannot log in to mysql

Configuring mysql-server-5.7 Automatic maintenance of MySQL server daemon disabled
Packaging maintainer scripts detected a case that it does not know how to handle and cannot continue configuring MySQL. Automatic management of your MySQL installation has been disabled to allow other packaging tasks to complete. For more details, see /etc/mysql/FROZEN.

The contents of etc/mysql/FROZEN read:

his MySQL or variant installation has entered "frozen mode". Maintainer scripts will avoid making changes or starting the daemon until manually released from this state. See /usr/share/doc/mysql-common/README for general information about this mode.

In this particular case, an incompatible downgrade attempt has been detected. This can be resolved in one of two ways:

1. Change the contents of /var/lib/mysql/ to contain database data that is compatible with the currently installed MySQL or variant daemon version. For example: you could restore from a backup. Alternatively you could do a dump using a future version binary and then a restore using the current version binary.

2. Switch to a MySQL or variant daemon version that is compatible with the data currently in /var/lib/mysql/. For example, if you have attempted a downgrade from mysql-server-5.7 to mysql-server-5.6, you could "apt install mysql-server-5.7" again.

I renamed the three files there that had to do with mysql and purged mysql again and tried another install, only to get the same message again.

The startup with 18.04 seems to take a bit longer than 17.10 so I ran systemd-analyze blame and found that apt-daily.service and apt-daily-upgrade.service are taking up over three minutes between them.

:~$ systemd-analyze time
    Startup finished in 9.173s (kernel) + 3min 30.201s (userspace) = 3min 39.375s
    graphical.target reached after 15.268s in userspace
:~$ systemd-analyze blame
    1min 52.265s apt-daily-upgrade.service
    1min 27.579s apt-daily.service
          6.603s NetworkManager-wait-online.service
          5.105s plymouth-quit-wait.service
          1.517s plymouth-start.service
          1.439s dev-sda1.device.............

So, what are these services actually doing (checking apt is up to date I imagine), why do they take so long and do I really need them to run on every bootup?

I have a Packard-Bell EasyNote laptop and have recently upgraded from Ubuntu 17.10 to 18.04. The laptop uses the nVidia Optimus system, meaning it has an Intel GPU for most tasks to conserve battery power but for graphic intensive tasks it has a nVidia GeForce GT 540M.

To switch between the GPUs I use the Bumblebee package. Choosing which nVidia driver to use has always been a problem in the past and since I upgraded to 17.04 a year ago I have simply used the builtin Nouveau driver. After reading that the proprietary drivers work under 18.04 I have tried updating to proprietary drivers but nothing seems to work.

~$ ubuntu-drivers devices

returns:

== /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0 ==
modalias : pci:v000010DEd00000DF4sv00001025sd00000512bc03sc00i00
vendor   : NVIDIA Corporation
model    : GF108M [GeForce GT 540M]
driver   : nvidia-340 - distro non-free
driver   : nvidia-304 - third-party free
driver   : nvidia-driver-390 - third-party free recommended
driver   : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin

But after installing nvidia-driver-390 (using both apt-get from the command line and Synaptic) the command nvidia-smi returns:

NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

I would be extremely grateful if somebody would give a step by step instruction for installing a working nVidia driver.

Since upgrading from 17.10 to 18.04 my video streaming and amimations have become choppy. Running glxgears it can be seen that the animation stops and then starts again every 3 seconds or so. The same with video streaming, the picture stutters every 3 seconds. This happens using the Intel GPU and also using the nVidia GPU via Bumblebee (Optirun).

Does anybody have an idea what could be causing this?

Since I upgraded from Ubuntu 17.10 to Ubuntu 18.04 whenever I open Thunderbird there is a globe icon, and sometimes also headphones icon, appearing in my list of new emails.

These icons hide the titles of my emails. When I move the mouse over the icons they partially disappear. When I scroll down there is another globe icon further down the list.