Wayne Werner's questions

I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 (start with server edition, because the hardware is pretty weak) on some older hardware - a desktop. Memtest ran fine on it before I installed, but it seems that it will randomly shut down - typically when I'm doing something like a sudo apt-get update. It appears to go through the normal shutdown process - I see all the shutdown messages, etc. But it's definitely a forcible sort of stop since I have to run dpkg --configure -a or whatever it is if I was in the middle of installing software.

Any clue what could be happening here? I have a theory it might be related to power consumption but I'm not sure why that would cause what I'm seeing. If I run glxgears I can run like 10 of them at a time (slows my FPS way down, of course) for a couple of minutes and then beeeooooop! Off my machine goes.

Is there somewhere I could look?

I'm running Ubuntu 16.04 on a System76 laptop. The brightness controls (i.e. Fn+F8 and Fn+F9) work great in Unity/Compiz/Gnome/whatever is default, but when I change to using i3wm instead I get... nothing.

Under the default, xev reports something different. With i3 it reports XF86MonBrightnessUp and XF86MonBrightnessDown, which would be pretty cool if xbacklight worked, but it doesn't. It just has zero effect.

wayne@waynego:~$ xbacklight -set 10
wayne@waynego:~$ echo $?
0

And my monitor is still as bright/dark as it was before.

The only thing that I've been able to get to work is this:

sudo sh -c "cat /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/max_brightness > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness"

Which you can probably agree is not ideal - cause I have to involve sudo, I mean I could gksudo or something but that's annoying, too. Clearly something works right with compiz/unity... I just don't know what it's doing.

Is there some way to get xbacklight to work, or some alternative? I'd prefer not to have to run sudo to change my backlight settings.

I'm trying to install Synergy 2.0.11, but I get a dependency issue:

Unpacking synergy (2.0.11.stable~b56+8c94f00f) ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of synergy:
 synergy depends on libqt5core5a (>= 5.7.0); however:
  Version of libqt5core5a:amd64 on system is 5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.5.
 synergy depends on libqt5svg5 (>= 5.6.0~beta); however:
  Version of libqt5svg5:amd64 on system is 5.5.1-2build1.
 synergy depends on libssl1.1 (>= 1.1.0); however:
  Package libssl1.1 is not installed.
 synergy depends on libstdc++6 (>= 6); however:
  Version of libstdc++6:amd64 on system is 5.4.0-6ubuntu1~16.04.9.
 synergy depends on qml-module-qtquick-controls (>= 5.5.0); however:
  Package qml-module-qtquick-controls is not installed.
 synergy depends on qml-module-qtquick-dialogs (>= 5.5.0); however:
  Package qml-module-qtquick-dialogs is not installed.

In the past I've just ran sudo apt -f install and it picks up the dependencies. Now, however, it's sad and tells me:

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  synergy

Why is apt trying to remove my package, and how do I tell it to install the dependencies instead?

I'm a bit of a command line nuthead.

I have a computer with dual monitors. Its setup works just fine in X11 - dual monitors, where my desktop stretches all the way across.

However, what I would like is to replicate that behavior when I'm using the virtual terminal. Right now, it simply mirrors the output.

Is there any way to have my resolution streeeeetch all the way across both monitors? e.g. instead of 80x24, I'd have 160x24?

As I discovered when asking this question, it appears that demond_nscan is trying to use a device without claiming it. And it does it.... hundreds of time per second apparently. This makes kern.log and syslog huge (100GB >).

In this particular case the problem is directly a result of some Lexmark drivers that were installed (found at /usr/local/lexmark/unix_scan_drivers/bin/demond_nscan).

Here are a few things I know:

• The drivers are for an all-in-one printer/scanner device.
• There was a previous lexmark printer-only that was installed with CUPS
• This driver was the one for CUPS systems, and I think that it automatically added it to the list of printers in CUPS.
• The issue started spamming kern/syslog only after these drivers were installed, using the lexmark installers

While googling around I found this thread that's not completely related, but it does mention that it might be happening when two drivers try to control the same device at the same time.

How can I resolve this issue so that either I only have one driver, or get the driver to claim the device before usage?

I've got my mom's computer running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. It's been working just fine but all of the sudden syslog has been filling up. And by filling up I mean I just deleted a /var/log/syslog that was 400GB in size. Yes - Gigabytes.

While I'm sure there was some useful information in there, I'm not sure that 400GB is any kind of information to sift through. And what's really amazing about it is that it happened within a period of 8 hours - I had ran df around noon, and between then and now her drive filled up 30% (from just under 70% to 100%).

What could be causing this and how could I fix it?`

EDIT Looks like the usb is the offender:

Sep  8 08:52:10 pamela-desktop kernel: [ 6198.157829] usb 1-3: usbfs: process 1500 (demond_nscan) did not claim interface 3 before use
Sep  8 08:52:10 pamela-desktop kernel: [ 6198.157836] usb 1-3: usbfs: process 1500 (demond_nscan) did not claim interface 3 before use
Sep  8 08:52:10 pamela-desktop kernel: [ 6198.157842] usb 1-3: usbfs: process 1500 (demond_nscan) did not claim interface 3 before use
Sep  8 08:52:10 pamela-desktop kernel: [ 6198.157849] usb 1-3: usbfs: process 1500 (demond_nscan) did not claim interface 3 before use
Sep  8 08:52:10 pamela-desktop kernel: [ 6198.157857] usb 1-3: usbfs: process 1500 (demond_nscan) did not claim interface 3 before use
Sep  8 08:52:10 pamela-desktop kernel: [ 6198.157863] usb 1-3: usbfs: process 1500 (demond_nscan) did not claim interface 3 before use
Sep  8 08:52:10 pamela-desktop kernel: [ 6198.157870] usb 1-3: usbfs: process 1500 (demond_nscan) did not claim interface 3 before use
Sep  8 08:52:10 pamela-desktop kernel: [ 6198.157877] usb 1-3: usbfs: process 1500 (demond_nscan) did not claim interface 3 before use
Sep  8 08:52:10 pamela-desktop kernel: [ 6198.157884] usb 1-3: usbfs: process 1500 (demond_nscan) did not claim interface 3 before use
Sep  8 08:52:10 pamela-desktop kernel: [ 6198.157891] usb 1-3: usbfs: process 1500 (demond_nscan) did not claim interface 3 before use

I've got an older system that's resource challenged. I've disabled/removed gdm and kdm, and removed the splash screen by editing /etc/default/grub and running sudo update-grub.

GDM doesn't start, and I don't get the splash screen. However, I'm left with

Checking battery state [ OK ]

and I have to press ctrl+alt+F1 to get to the virtual terminal. How can I make the startup process end at tty0?

(I'm running Ubuntu 10.10)

I tried to upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 through the upgrade wizard. I had about 30 minutes left on my install, and had to leave. When I came back, my computer was frozen, so I had to do a hard reset.

When it rebooted, I was shown this screen:

It appeared unresponsive, but I could ctrlaltF1 and get to the terminal where I could log in. It appears that I am not connected to the 'net - sudo dhclient only appears to output one line of text rather than the several that it should. ping 192.168.1.1 does nothing, but I can ping localhost -c 4.

I was hoping that following the instructions here would give me a plain screen without any X startup (that was my theory on why it didn't look good) but it didn't appear to have any effect - also where the author had 7 lines of output, I had only one (which I can't read, of course).

any ideas about what I can do? I suspect it may be an issue with the video card drivers - I have some NVidia card (computer posts just fine, so I know the issue is after the OS takes over). I don't remember if I installed GRUB, but I didn't see any menu pop up the several times I booted. On two boot-ups it actually showed the Ubuntu splash screen, but there it hung and I couldn't get to the terminal like it does when I get the "jail" screen.

If I could get it hooked up to the network I have sshd installed (at least I can ssh to localhost, and I could SSH in from other computers before my upgrade), and could log in and see what I could fix that way.

Worst case scenario, I believe I partitioned off my /home/ directory, so I could reinstall just the OS portion, but I don't really want to do that - I had a lot of problems initially installing Ubuntu with this hardware configuration in the first place and I don't want to go through that again.

So any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

I've been using Guake on my laptop and my desktop and everything has been fine until I recently bought a new HD and did a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.10.

I installed Guake and it works fine except for when I try to use GNU screen:

wayne@arglefraster:~$ screen -xRR
Please set a terminal type.
wayne@arglefraster:~$ echo $TERM
dumb

In my Guake config preferences I have /bin/bash set as my default interpreter - which is the same thing that I have on my laptop. Both xterm and gnome-terminal shows xterm as the TERM value, and even ctrlaltF1 shows linux.

So how do I get Guake to use the proper TERM value so I can avoid having to export TERM=xterm in my Guake every time?

I'm trying to install Ubuntu 10.04 on a SATA drive on a desktop computer. It's a 2 TB hitachi. If I go through the standard install process, I get an fsync error. The drive showed up in the installer. When I swapped to the terminal and did an fdisk -l, it showed the other drives, but instead of sda, I got another error message that was also in dmesg:

[  243.128549] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 3907029152
[  243.128648] sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled error code
[  243.128652] sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[  243.128656] sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 e8 e0 87 20 00 00 08 00

dmesg had about 250 copies of those four lines.

I checked this question, and even checked the BIOS settings, but I couldn't find anything helpful, so I turn to the mighty collective wisdom of the SE network. Any ideas about what's wrong? Need more info?

Thanks!

I'm fairly sure this program exists, but I don't remember what it was called.

There are a few drop-down terminal programs (guake, yakuke, tilde), and I've been a fan of guake for a while. However, since I discovered GNU Screen I've been more interested in using Eterm. But I would like to make it dropdown/hide on keypress, similar to the way Guake does. I remember at some point that someone mentioned a program that allowed you to do similar things with basically any other window.

Unfortunately my time spent googling around for terms like "show/hide any terminal ubuntu" have been met with stupid Windows search engine spam.

Any clue where I could find the program I'm looking for?

Thanks!

I frequently ssh into my box at home from school, but usually when I change classes and my computer suspends, the pipe will be broken. However, ssh simply locks up - Ctrl+c, Ctrl+z and Ctrl+d have no effect.

It's annoying to have to restart my terminal, and even more annoying to have to close and re-create a new screen window.

So my question, is there an easy way to make ssh die properly (i.e. when the pipe fails "normally" it will exit with a message about a broken pipe)? Or do I have to figure out what the PID is and manually kill it?

After an hour or two of manpage and Google searching and finding no solution or good resources, I've come for help!

I have set my Caps Lock key to Ctrl using setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps - this works perfectly fine.

However, since I use [awesome][1], and an IBM model M which lacks the meta key, I need my left alt key to replace the windows key. Using xkeycaps I was able to get this to work, except it killed my arrow keys and End. Problematic.

Unfortunately, documentation on setxkbmap options are sparse. and I can't find the proper option to use.

Thanks for any links/solutions.

Exactly what the title asks. How do I clear xmodmap settings?

I have an IBM model M, and somehow xkeycaps got it into its head that my End key was not any key at all. xev reports keypresses when I use it, so I know the event is being generated by the keyboard. Also, xkeycaps thinks that my arrow keys are all wonky, and apparently the scrollbar is broken so it only scrolls down - so I can't scroll up to find an IBM keyboard that just maybe is close to my map so I can fix my keys.

So I'm trying to reset my keyboard to the default settings, but the xmodmap manpage is woefully devoid of "reset all" or "clear all" or anything of that nature (that I was able to find).

I'm using the awesome window manager, and it's, well, awesome.

However, I have a slight issue - I'm using an IBM Model M keyboard, which lacks the Meta key.

This is kind of a problem, as awesome relies on it for basically every action you can make.

I do tend to use my Ctrl and Alt keys quite often, so I'm not really able to remap those - however what I would like to be able to do is remap Ctrl+Alt to fire a meta event. Is this possible? I've toyed around with xkeycaps and done some searches on "rebind ctrl+alt" but most of the results give me either swapping the two keys or something else. (Also, I use caps-lock as an additional control, or I would just map that one.)

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

I'm trying to install the File System Visualizer (think "It's a UNIX System! I know this!" from Jurassic Park) on Ubuntu 10.10.

I've got the .tar.gz downloaded, and extracted. However, when I ./configure, I get this output:

loading cache ./config.cache
checking for a BSD compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking whether make sets ${MAKE}... yes
checking for working aclocal... found
checking for working autoconf... found
checking for working automake... found
checking for working autoheader... found
checking for working makeinfo... missing
checking for gcc... gcc
checking whether the C compiler (gcc  ) works... yes
checking whether the C compiler (gcc  ) is a cross-compiler... no
checking whether we are using GNU C... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E
checking for ranlib... ranlib
checking for POSIXized ISC... no
checking for dirent.h that defines DIR... yes
checking for opendir in -ldir... no
checking for ANSI C header files... yes
checking whether time.h and sys/time.h may both be included... yes
checking for strings.h... yes
checking for sys/time.h... yes
checking for unistd.h... yes
checking for working const... yes
checking for mode_t... yes
checking for uid_t in sys/types.h... yes
checking for pid_t... yes
checking for size_t... yes
checking for comparison_fn_t... yes
checking for st_blocks in struct stat... yes
checking whether struct tm is in sys/time.h or time.h... time.h
checking for working alloca.h... yes
checking for alloca... yes
checking for working fnmatch... yes
checking for strftime... yes
checking for getcwd... yes
checking for gettimeofday... yes
checking for mktime... yes
checking for strcspn... yes
checking for strdup... yes
checking for strspn... yes
checking for strtod... yes
checking for strtoul... yes
checking for scandir... yes
checking for inline... inline
checking for off_t... yes
checking for unistd.h... (cached) yes
checking for getpagesize... yes
checking for working mmap... yes
checking for argz.h... yes
checking for limits.h... yes
checking for locale.h... yes
checking for nl_types.h... yes
checking for malloc.h... yes
checking for string.h... yes
checking for unistd.h... (cached) yes
checking for sys/param.h... yes
checking for getcwd... (cached) yes
checking for munmap... yes
checking for putenv... yes
checking for setenv... yes
checking for setlocale... yes
checking for strchr... yes
checking for strcasecmp... yes
checking for strdup... (cached) yes
checking for __argz_count... yes
checking for __argz_stringify... yes
checking for __argz_next... yes
checking for stpcpy... yes
checking for LC_MESSAGES... yes
checking whether NLS is requested... yes
checking whether included gettext is requested... no
checking for libintl.h... yes
checking for gettext in libc... yes
checking for msgfmt... /usr/bin/msgfmt
checking for dcgettext... yes
checking for gmsgfmt... /usr/bin/msgfmt
checking for xgettext... /usr/bin/xgettext
checking for gtk-config... no
checking for GTK - version >= 1.2.1... no
*** The gtk-config script installed by GTK could not be found
*** If GTK was installed in PREFIX, make sure PREFIX/bin is in
*** your path, or set the GTK_CONFIG environment variable to the
*** full path to gtk-config.
configure: error: Cannot find proper GTK+ version

Obviously it's looking for gtk-config. However, apparently it doesn't exist in the repos anymore. Then this post mentioned that gtkglarea solved their problem, as mentioned in this file.

Of course that poster neatly forgets to mention exactly what and how gtkglarea solved their problem, and Google is mostly devoid of information on the problem.

So I come here asking for help! I would like to install fsv, but it tells me gtk-config doesn't exist. How can I fix this problem in Ubuntu 10.10?

Thanks!

EDIT

So with the help of Robert, this is what I had to do:

From the Dapper repositories I downloaded:

libgtk1.2-dev_1.2.10-18_i386.deb
libgtk1.2_1.2.10-18_i386.deb
libgtk1.2-common_1.2.10-18_all.deb
gtkglarea5-dev_1.2.3-2ubuntu4_i386.deb
gtkglarea5_1.2.3-2ubuntu4_i386.deb
libglib1.2_1.2.10-10.1build1_i386.deb
libglib1.2-dev_1.2.10-10.1build1_i386.deb

then I had to install:

1. libglib1.2
2. libglib1.2-dev
3. libgtk1.2-common
4. libgtk1.2
5. libgtk1.2-dev
6. gtkglarea5
7. gtkglarea5-dev

I used sudo gdebi <file>.deb for most of them (it tells you dependencies better, if you missed one). In a few cases, gdebi does not do the right thing, and dies. When this happens, use dpkg -i <file>.deb and it should work.

I have Ubuntu 10.04 installed on a desktop computer with an MSI ms-7142 motherboard. Both when I was testing and after I installed, it can't find any network card. There is a built-in card, but lspci doesn't show any network card. I haven't yet tossed an external PCI card in to check and see if it can find that, but I was curious to know if there are any ideas?

Thanks!

I've got an x61 tablet pc with fingerprint reader, and I want a way to see the image(?) scanned when I swipe my finger. Obviously I can use it for login - I don't really care about that, it's easier for me to type my password. I just want to be able to see the fingerprint it gets.

I have a Lenovo x61 tablet PC running Ubuntu 10.04. I've got Karol Krizka's auto-rotate daemon working, along with a variety of other applications like cellwriter, though for some reason even when it's working properly, it needed a fix for me. There's a host of other applications I use such as

• xournal, for general notetaking
• mypaint, for drawing
• easystroke, for gesture recognition

probably others that I forget at the moment...

But I was wondering if there are any good tablet-oriented desktop environments for Ubuntu?

I know of the awesome window manager, which after some customization may suit my desires, but I was wondering if there is a keyboard-centric desktop environment that doesn't require too much tweaking to make it really useful. Of course gnome and I'm sure KDE have nice shortcuts, and the ability to set them up how you want, but that becomes a problem because in a lot of cases the keyboard ends out conflicting with built-in program behavior.

Any suggestions?