Adalbert Hanßen's questions

Currently there are several known security issues in Ghostscript:

• CVE-2024-29510

• CVE-2024-29506

• CVE-2024-29507

• CVE-2024-29508

• CVE-2024-29509

• CVE-2024-29510, see https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2024-29510

• CVE-2024-29511

not fixed in actual Versions of Ubuntu? gs is part of CUPS and therefore on almost every Ubuntu computer. This is a very attractive security target for malicious people!

See for example:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52998331/imagemagick-security-policy-pdf-blocking-conversion
• https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/332928/
• https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Cybersicherheitswarnungen/DE/2023/2023-248889-1012.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=2
• https://tuxcare.com/blog/ghostscript-vulnerability-actively-exploited-in-attacks/
• https://securityaffairs.com/165449/hacking/ghostscript-vulnerability-cve-2024-29510.html

Unfortunately, I don't know much about computer security. But what I have read worries me and I am surprised that the existing version 10.03.1 has not yet been rolled out generally.

Some Ubuntu mirror servers still use http instead of https. In addition, a manipulated iso image version with a matching sha256 sum could be foisted on a download server. To ensure tamper-proof and transmission-proof iso images, the servers offer two files: SHA256SUMS and SHA256SUMS.gpg.

SHA256SUMS contains the file names of the offered variants of iso files with the corresponding sha256 sums.

A tutorial suggests to tamper-check these two files like this:

1. gpg --keyid-format long --verify SHA256SUMS.gpg SHA256SUMS

   This command verifies SHA256SUMS by the detached signature from SHA256SUMS.gpg and returns the fingerprint and pretended issuer of the key with which the signature had been computed. In my case it still says that it is only an alleged source and nothing indicates that the signature really belongs to the alleged owner.

2. gpg --keyid-format long --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys <key ID from previous step, the one without blanks, the whole thing prepended with 0x>

I would like to know why command 2., suggested in How to verify your Ubuntu download, is safe against a man in the middle attack

After installing Xubuntu 22.04 on a laptop previously running with Xubuntu 18.04 (not altering its existing partition /home, I just designated its existing partition as /home during install), I had to repeat all configurations (panel, appearance of the desktop, configuration of Firefox, Shortcuts, automatically started applications…). I also had to create users and groups as they were before on the old system (I hope did it without creating new home directories for them).

In order to save all this configuration work for the second user, I just copied the hidden folder .config from the home directory of the first user, for whom I had established all these settings. Of course I adjusted owners and access rights to the user's home directory before proceeding.

This method worked well in other cases, only few fine tuning operations became necessary for the other user (like modifying the desktop backdrops appearance and other user-specific things).

But one thing is really strange and I don’t know how to cope with it:

All the basic folders from that user’s home directory are shown on the desktop as if they were part of that user’s directory ~/Arbeitsfläche (desktop)! Those directories are not shown as links but rather as if they are really situated in his personal folder desktop but they are not there, as Thunar shows. However, if I delete one of those directories to the trash can, it also is deleted from that user's home directory!

In a German localization, the folder desktop is sometimes called Arbeitsfläche, in some other cases it is called Schreibtisch. I have already placed question 1466339 what really defines the name of this folder.

I have no idea what causes this strange behavior, nor do I have any idea, how to prevent folders like Bilder, Dokumente, Downloads, Musik, Öffentlich, …, snap, Vorlagen being shown there, whereas the content of the folder Arbeitsfläche or Schreibtisch is not shown, but the folder itself is shown instead!

How can I fix this?

What is it that loads the CPU so unreasonably? (Lenovo W530 with Xubuntu 20.04.4 LTS, currently using kernel 5.4.0-110-generic x86_64).

After an upgrade, the CPU on my Lenovo W530 laptop spins at an increased (but not yet maximum) speed. The load indicator shows 267 processes, the quad-core CPU is over 27% utilized and 1.7 GiB of 6.7 GiB RAM (according to Taskmanager). All programs react quite delayed.

In the task manager I see that /usr/sbin/lightdm (with only little CPU load) calls /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg -core :0 -seat seat0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch and that causes 25% CPU load (i.e. one complete thread of my Intel i7-3520M CPU @ 2.90GHz CPU) and say 101.5 MiB RSS.

Meanwhile I have found out that the memory consumption sometimes continually accumulates. After quite some run time, even some swap space is used and even large amounts of memory stay in use, even after all application programs have been closed.

In order to find out what eats up all my memory I tried top with this command, which lets me direct its output to a file q:

top -c -n 1 -d 1 -w 256 > q

I have to set the width of the terminal wide enough to not truncate the command lines invoking the CPU stressing task, -w 512 seems to not work when the terminal width is small:

In a lucky situation when the whole computer does not acts sluggish and I get:

adalbert@W:~$ top -c -n 1 -d 1 -w 256 > q
adalbert@W:~$ cat q
top - 23:20:20 up  2:22,  1 user,  load average: 1,14, 1,24, 1,23
Tasks: 258 gesamt,   2 laufend, 256 schlafend,   0 gestoppt,   0 Zombie
%CPU(s): 26,9 be, 11,9 sy,  0,0 ni, 61,2 un,  0,0 wa,  0,0 hi,  0,0 si,  0,0 st
MiB Spch :   6656,3 gesamt,   2318,3 frei,   2264,9 belegt,   2073,0 Puff/Cache
MiB Swap:   2048,0 gesamt,   2048,0 frei,      0,0 belegt.   4072,7 verfü Spch 
PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     ZEIT+ BEFEHL
1215 root      20   0  506648 165776  73068 R 100,0   2,4 135:17.46 /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg -core :0 -+
2435 adalbert  20   0  422820  71496  39232 S  12,5   1,0   0:51.80 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/tou+
2003 adalbert  20   0  294092  87384  17492 S   6,2   1,3  11:48.71 xfsettingsd --display :0.0 --+
7727 adalbert  20   0  428024  77616  31952 S   6,2   1,1   0:31.07 /usr/bin/xfce4-terminal
34284 root      20   0       0      0      0 I   6,2   0,0   0:00.04 [kworker/3:1-events]
1 root      20   0  167876  11804   8388 S   0,0   0,2   0:01.28 /sbin/init splash     

lightdm is the display manager. Why does it call Xorg -core …? in this special way?

Why does it use that much CPU power?

How can I cope with this situation?

My ultimate goal: use the fingeprint reader of a Lenovo T430 on Ubuntustdio 20.04.

Type oft the device, according to lsusb:

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 147e:2020 Upek TouchChip Fingerprint Coprocessor (WBF advanced mode).

According to https://fprint.freedesktop.org/supported-devices.html they support this device.

I downloaded libfprint-master.tar.gz using the button Download from https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libfprint/libfprint.git and unzipped it to some directory libfprintf. After unzipping, I find another directory libfprint-master in it and there is among others a directory builddir in that one.

After installing python and meson-0.61.1, I also added

export PATH="$PATH:/home/verwalter/.local/bin"

to ~/.profile in order to call meson builddir without explicitly giving the full path to meson. According to https://mesonbuild.com/Quick-guide.html#compiling-a-meson-project I should

1. cd to the root directory of the source code. I did so:

   cd /home/verwalter/Downloads/libfprint/libfprint-master
   

2. apply meson builddir && cd builddir from there

3. do further steps.

Step 2 failed with these messages:

The Meson build system
Version: 0.61.1
Source dir: /home/verwalter/Downloads/libfprint/libfprint-master
Build dir: /home/verwalter/Downloads/libfprint/libfprint-master/builddir
Build type: native build
Project name: libfprint
Project version: 1.94.2
C compiler for the host machine: cc (gcc 9.3.0 "cc (Ubuntu 9.3.0-17ubuntu1~20.04) 9.3.0")
...
meson.build:68: WARNING: Consider using the built-in warning_level option instead of using "-Wall".
meson.build:69: WARNING: Consider using the built-in warning_level option instead of using "-Wall".
Found pkg-config: /usr/bin/pkg-config (0.29.1)
...
Run-time dependency gobject-2.0 found: YES 2.64.6
Did not find CMake 'cmake'
Found CMake: NO
Run-time dependency gusb found: NO (tried pkgconfig)

meson.build:84:0: ERROR: Dependency "gusb" not found, tried pkgconfig

A full log can be found at /home/verwalter/Downloads/libfprint/libfprint-master/builddir/meson-logs/meson-log.txt

What did I miss? What's the next step to correct this?

I have to split a table into columns.

The texts in two neighboring columns each match the expression (\S+\s+)+\s*. But sometimes, one column gets a bit larger than it should and then there is only one space at the end of the element in the 1st column such that the regex for the first column also catches the second one. The digits 1 and 2 in the example denote to which column the characters belong, there are not really those digits in the file, e.g.:

111 111 11111 111111 222 2 2222 222 2
11 1 11  11111       2 22 2222 222 2
111 111 11 11 111 1 111 222 2 222 22 2
11 1 11  11111       2 22 2222 222 2
111 111 11111 11111  222 2 2222 222 2

The nominal width of the first column is 20 characters, but if a "word" starts in them and extends past column 20, it still belongs to the first column up to space delimiting it. See the example in the third line.

Is there something to do two tests in sequence in one regex: first select (in the example) 20 characters, but if the 20th character is different from white space, select (.{19}\S+\s) in the capturing group for the first column?

I have a series of png-images (actually they are taken from an mp4-file).

I want to crop the same region from all the images I have taken.

What tool is best for that, such that I can define the region first and then crop all the png images to the same region of interest.

Is there something to batch compress the resultant images (lossless)?

I tried apngasm, unfortunately the details to be shown in the series get optimized away - although apngasm is said to work lossless!

Since all the resultant images have great similarity: What is the best way to zip them to minimum size such that they can easily appended to an email such that the other person can look at them step by step to discuss the detail I want to show in them.

I want to create two users (e.g. adm1 and adm2), because each of them wants his own password, to which he is used. They shall share the same home directory however, let's call that admx.

Is this possible?

If it is: How does one achieve it?

(of course they both will belong to the same group=admx)

To prevent my SSD from unnecessary write accesses, I entered noatime under the mount options in /etc/fstab for the system and home partitions:

UUID=bla-bla-bla-1 /       ext4  errors=remount-ro,noatime 0 1
UUID=bla-bla-bla-2 /home   ext4  defaults,noatime          0 2

After that I rebooted.

Now I am surprised that the command

find . * -atime -0,01 -type f -printf "%TY-%Tm-%TdT%TT %p\n" | sort -r | ssed -R 's/^([^.]+)\.\d+ (.*)$/\1 \2/'

which I use occasionally to check which files have been accessed within the last approx. 1/4 hour, still works. On the one hand this is pleasing, but on the other hand I fear that noatime has not taken effect after all.

How can I check this?

How can I copy files to some destination folder such that

1. Access rights are derived from umask, i.e. the copied files and folders should behave with this respect as if they have been newly created. - I know that one can apply chmod recursively to a directory branch and all subbranches, but that would also affect other files, not just the copied ones.
2. The owner and group are taken from the destination folder.

Note: The SGID-Bit for the destination folder is set.

Recently I made a live USB stick with Xubuntu 20.04.02 LTS with Startup media creator (this might be usb-creator-gtk).

I tried to resize the partition after creating the stick in order to provide an additional data partition. But that was impossible: Although the capacity of the stick was 32 GB, gparted showed it as completely occupied and prevented me from reducing the size of the ISO9660-partition on it.

However, lsblk tells me about three partitions on it:

$ lsblk -o name,size,fstype,partflags,model,vendor /dev/sdc
NAME    SIZE FSTYPE  PARTFLAGS MODEL            VENDOR
sdc    29,3G iso9660           Flash Disk       Generic
├─sdc1  1,6G iso9660 0x80
├─sdc2  3,9M vfat
└─sdc3 27,7G ext4
$ lsblk -o Name,size,fstype,uuid,label,mountpoint | grep -E sdc
sdc     29,3G iso9660  2021-02-09-19-20-08-00               Xubuntu 20.04.2.0 LTS amd64
├─sdc1   1,6G iso9660  2021-02-09-19-20-08-00               Xubuntu 20.04.2.0 LTS amd64 /media/user/Xubuntu 20.04.2.0 LTS amd64
├─sdc2   3,9M vfat     54C5-9C6C                            Xubuntu 20.04.2.0 LTS amd64
└─sdc3  27,7G ext4     80b4c9bd-f04c-4bc2-8ae8-7551e6026d49 writable                    /media/user/writable
$

Surprisingly the same UUID appears twice: Once for the whole device and once more for the ISO9660-partition. The same label even appears three times: for all three partitions!

To my understanding that's not a very good idea. I would prefer more meaningful labels, e.g. Xubuntu20.04.2-amd64_purpose, where purpose indicates the purpose of that partition.

I wonder about the partition with label writable: It seems to keep track when the stick was used for installation. I could store data there, but I could not access them from the live system!

I have the impression that the partition with label writable is mounted in the live system as /var/crash. I stored a script there and I used it. But after shutting down the live system, my script on /var/crash was gone. Could someone please demystify the partition architecture of my Live USB-Stick for Xubuntu 20.04.02 LTS amd64?

The comments up to 2021-08-09 told me about the benefits of a full install (which is not my question) and how to make a persistent install (which also is not my question).

I had wasted some weeks with persistent installs using unetbootin: I had made them with a persistent partition labelled casper-rw. Unfortunately during shutdown, there is an awful lot of writing to the thumbdrive while the screen looks innocently black. If one disconnects the stick during that dangerous time, casper-rw is ruined (inode errors)!

Updating a system on a persistently installed USB-drive can take an awful amount of time. E.g. I exchanged firefox by chromium. I suppose that the time consumption is due to the huge number of turns of the transfer direction between reading and writing, which causes the electronics of USB3-devices to slow down by large factors. It got even worse, when I tried to compile a Jamulus system to be present on my live stick. I know that during make many files are read, other files are written and possibly intermediate files are created and deleted after use. This causes stress for which the electronics of USB3-sticks is not made.

To get out off the mud after wrecking my partition casper-rw, I had created a spare partition with a backup copy of a previous working casper-rw (of course with a different LABEL). But copying from one to the other one (both had exactly the same size) with cp -a (after deleting all previous files of the target partition) took much longer than adding an intermediate step of first copying to my fixed disk and then copying to the thumb drive: This observation led me to the conclusion that changing the data transfer direction is the root cause for time consumption when updating a persistent installation.

My questions above were after an explanation of why I could not resize the partition made with start media creation tool.

My questions above were after the purpose of the partition writable found on the stick.

My objective is to create partition on the live stick, which can be mounted as /home to be used for scripts, which apply some on-the-fly modifications like those, which I apply manually when trying the live system. My second objective is to create partition on the live stick, which can be mounted as /home with scripts of on-the-fly installations of additional software (which happen in the ram-fs and which will be gone after shutdown). Of course, the ultimate goal would be to have that partition mounted as /home automatically.

My objective would be in the middle between a DVD-like Read-Only installation medium and a persistent one. The difference is that such a stick can not be updated (persistently). The difference to a full install is, that it will run on any computer (capable of running the system, of course) rather than the particular one, to which a full install of a stick seems to be limited.

(N.B. I once made a full install stick for a Lenovo W530. It did not boot on a Lenovo T410. But it did on a T430 and on a T430s. The architecture of those two models seems to be close enough to let them boot, but many other computers which I tried did not boot from it. So in general, a full install seems to be limited to the target computer and very close relatives only).

Unfortunately persistent partitions seem to be infeasible because of the very time consuming shutdown process: I observed more than 5 minutes of disk activity! Otherwise inode-errors happen very often.

I have made a persistent Live stick for Ubuntustudio 20.04.2.0 LTS.

I want to let people boot from this stick to use it in the configuration I have made.

However I want to avoid that somebody playing around just clicks on the desktop icon "Ubuntu Studio 20.04.0 LTS installieren" and in the worst case does not understand the following dialogues. He might ruin the installed system on the hard disk or SSD.

Therefore I removed this starter from the desktop. However, although my stick has a partition casper-rw and it remembers things I have done in previous sessions (e.g. commands entered to a terminal, stored files and the like), the starter "Ubuntu Studio 20.04.0 LTS installieren" re-appears after each reboot, although I have deleted it before shutting down and the stick is persistent.

How can I prevent the reappearing of this particular starter.

One other question targeted at the use case of this persistent live stick to be tried by very computer-unexperienced people: How could I possibly prevent the (normal) user from any changes to /dev/sdaX, i.e. all partition of the builtin hard drive or builtin SSD? It must not be fail proof against people knowing about sudo, pkexec or the files governing the use of becoming root: Just the normal user should be prevented from altering the builtin disk. Would this be possible by mounting the partitions found on /dev/sda? Could one achieve this by manipulating systemd? If yes: how?

Some applications (e.g. GIMP) seem to order directories first in their the File>Open, File>Save or any other file related dialogue.

Some other applications (e.g. LibreOffice) don't sort directories first. LibreOffice does not even sort out files it can not deal with in the File>Open dialogue.

For storing files, it might be desirable to also see file names belonging to other applications, e.g. to use one of them as a template for a file to be stored by modifying an existing file name (for example, if a LO file logically belongs to some context with files names following a certain pattern representing this logical context). But in a file store dialogue from e.g. LO, I would prefer to see the non-LO files names in some other colour, e.g. medium grey instead of black.

Further the formatting of the date column in file-related dialogues has the nasty file date representation: Today/Yesterday/name of a weekday or a local representation of the date for files changed more than a week ago. I dislike this particular formatting of dates. I would prefer to have ISO-8601 formatting of file dates everywhere in file related dialogues. Fortunately Thunar has something to let it always use ISO-8601 formatting. Unfortunately this is not the default setting of Thunar in a newly installed system!

Also I would prefer, if directories were more easily discernible from files, in addition to being all sorted to the top. I would prefer it, if the textual part for them uses another colour than for files (e.g. blue for directories instead of black for files ) or if at least the symbols if directories have an easily discernible colour.

Under Windows, all file-related dialogues seem to be just some other incarnation of the Windows file explorer. The good thing about that is,

• that one might easily correct a mistyped filename which one encounters in an open or save a file dialogue - even if the file name to be corrected is not the one of the file to be loaded or saved.
• One also can use the context menu functions, e.g. copy a file location to the clipboard in order to use that in some other context or program.
• One can use search patterns during the open/save file dialogues: during typing, the displayed set to be selected from narrows according to what has been typed. The search also can be made to extend from the current directory down to its subdirectories, which is a very powerful thing which I miss under Ubuntu.

So my question is:

• Who is responsible for the file-related dialogues of GUI programs?
• Is this one (or two) central instance(s)? Or is the appearance of dialogues involving file operations up to each application? In the latter case, I would have to address quite some application maintainers for improvement like those given above.

I have a Lenovo W530 laptop and it runs Xubuntu 18.04.4 LTS currently with kernel 5.3.0-40-generic x86_64. xrandr has version 1.5.0 and the version of RandR is 1.5.

My problem: I can’t use an external screen attached through the VGA port – neither when it is connected directly to the laptop outside of the docking station nor when it is connected to the VGA port of the docking station when the laptop is seated in it. However, under Windows 10, I can use the external screen in both situations. (Under Windows, the VGA port of the laptop itself does not work properly when the laptop is in the docking station. That does not prevent using the VGA port completely like under Xubuntu 18.04). - If I remember right, the VGA port has worked before uner Xubuntu 16.04, but I have no chance to check that right now.

Under Windows 10 I can use a second screen attached to the VGA port. It is even possible to control three screens by the W530 laptop: the builtin laptop screen, another screen attached through VGA and yet another screen attached through DP (with an adapter DP1-HDMI). In this situation, the builtin laptop screen is controlled by the Intel HD Graphics 4000, the other two screens are controlled by the NVIDIA Quadro K1000M Version 80.7.32.0.f, according to Windows.

The integrated NVIDIA Graphics of the computer is activated in the BIOS. There is a file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/11-nvidia-prime.conf and its content is

# DO NOT EDIT. AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED BY gpu-manager

Section "OutputClass"
  Identifier "Nvidia Prime"
  MatchDriver "nvidia-drm"
  Driver "nvidia"
  Option "AllowEmptyInitialConfiguration"
  Option "IgnoreDisplayDevices" "CRT"
  Option "PrimaryGPU" "Yes"
  ModulePath "/x86_64-linux-gnu/nvidia/xorg"
EndSection

One hint I found when looking for other solutions, was to put a # in front of the line

Option "IgnoreDisplayDevices" "CRT"

to deactivate it. I did that although I saw the warning at the beginning of the file. This hint did not work. When I looked at this file later, I saw that the # had vanished, so probably it did not survive when I made my test and perhaps it had already gone at my test. The warning at the beginning of the file seems to be fully justified.

lscpi tells me:

a@v:~$  lspci | grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics 
Controller (rev 09)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107GLM [Quadro K1000M] (rev a1)
a@v:~$

xrandr tells me:

a@v:~$ xrandr --prop Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 16384 x 16384 LVDS-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) CscMatrix: 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 BorderDimensions: 4 supported: 4 Border: 0 0 0 0 range: (0, 65535) SignalFormat: LVDS supported: LVDS ConnectorType: Panel ConnectorNumber: 0 _ConnectorLocation: 0 non-desktop: 0 supported: 0, 1 DP-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) CscMatrix: 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 BorderDimensions: 4 supported: 4 Border: 0 0 0 0 range: (0, 65535) SignalFormat: TMDS supported: TMDS ConnectorType: DisplayPort ConnectorNumber: 2 _ConnectorLocation: 2 non-desktop: 0 supported: 0, 1 DP-1 connected 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 698mm x 392mm CscMatrix: 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 EDID: 00ffffffffffff0034a996a201010101 00180103808048780adaffa3584aa229 17494b21080031404540614081800101 010101010101023a80d072382d40102c 4580ba882100001e023a801871382d40 582c4500ba882100001e000000fc0050 616e61736f6e69632d54560a000000fd 00173d0f440f000a202020202020015a 020322f24d9f90140520212213041203 16072309070168030c001000b8260fe2 004b011d80d0721c1620102c2580ba88 2100009e011d8018711c1620582c2500 ba882100009e011d00bc52d01e20b828 5540ba882100001e662156aa51001e30 468f3300ba882100001e000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000bb BorderDimensions: 4 supported: 4 Border: 0 0 0 0 range: (0, 65535) SignalFormat: TMDS supported: TMDS ConnectorType: DisplayPort ConnectorNumber: 3 _ConnectorLocation: 3 non-desktop: 0 supported: 0, 1 1920x1080 50.00*+ 60.00 59.94 29.97 25.00 23.98 60.05 60.00 50.04 1366x768 59.79 1280x1024 60.02 1280x720 59.94 50.00 1024x768 60.00 800x600 60.32 720x576 50.00 720x480 59.94 640x480 59.95 59.94 DP-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) CscMatrix: 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 BorderDimensions: 4 supported: 4 Border: 0 0 0 0 range: (0, 65535) SignalFormat: TMDS supported: TMDS ConnectorType: DisplayPort ConnectorNumber: 4 _ConnectorLocation: 4 non-desktop: 0 supported: 0, 1 DP-3 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) CscMatrix: 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 BorderDimensions: 4 supported: 4 Border: 0 0 0 0 range: (0, 65535) SignalFormat: DisplayPort supported: DisplayPort ConnectorType: DisplayPort ConnectorNumber: 2 _ConnectorLocation: 2 non-desktop: 0 supported: 0, 1 DP-4 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) CscMatrix: 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 BorderDimensions: 4 supported: 4 Border: 0 0 0 0 range: (0, 65535) SignalFormat: DisplayPort supported: DisplayPort ConnectorType: DisplayPort ConnectorNumber: 3 _ConnectorLocation: 3 non-desktop: 0 supported: 0, 1 DP-5 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) CscMatrix: 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 0 0 0 65536 0 BorderDimensions: 4 supported: 4 Border: 0 0 0 0 range: (0, 65535) SignalFormat: DisplayPort supported: DisplayPort ConnectorType: DisplayPort ConnectorNumber: 4 _ConnectorLocation: 4 non-desktop: 0 supported: 0, 1 LVDS-1-1 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 193mm EDID: 00ffffffffffff0030aeb24000000000 0113010380221378ea2135ad5037aa24 11505400000001010101010101010101 0101010101014c368082703832403c30 aa0058c1100000183f2d808270383240 3c30aa0058c1100000180000000f00d1 0932d109281b190006af5634000000fe 004231353648573031205634200a00d6 PRIME Synchronization: 0 supported: 0, 1 scaling mode: Full aspect supported: Full, Center, Full aspect link-status: Good supported: Good, Bad CONNECTOR_ID: 67 supported: 67 non-desktop: 0 range: (0, 1) 1920x1080 60.00*+ 59.97 59.96 59.93 50.00 1680x1050 59.95 59.88 1600x1024 60.17 1400x1050 59.98 1600x900 59.99 59.94 59.95 59.82 1280x1024 60.02 1440x900 59.89 1400x900 59.96 59.88 1280x960 60.00 1440x810 60.00 59.97 1368x768 59.88 59.85 1360x768 59.80 59.96 1280x800 59.99 59.97 59.81 59.91 1152x864 60.00 1280x720 60.00 59.99 59.86 59.74 960x720 60.00 928x696 60.05 896x672 60.01 1024x576 59.95 59.96 59.90 59.82 960x600 59.93 60.00 960x540 59.96 59.99 59.63 59.82 800x600 60.00 60.32 56.25 840x525 60.01 59.88 864x486 59.92 59.57 800x512 60.17 700x525 59.98 800x450 59.95 59.82 640x512 60.02 720x450 59.89 700x450 59.96 59.88 640x480 60.00 59.94 720x405 59.51 58.99 684x384 59.88 59.85 680x384 59.80 59.96 640x400 59.88 59.98 576x432 60.06 640x360 59.86 59.83 59.84 59.32 512x384 60.00 512x288 60.00 59.92 480x270 59.63 59.82 400x300 60.32 56.34 432x243 59.92 59.57 320x240 60.05 360x202 59.51 59.13 320x180 59.84 59.32 VGA-1-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) PRIME Synchronization: 1 supported: 0, 1 link-status: Good supported: Good, Bad CONNECTOR_ID: 71 supported: 71 non-desktop: 0 range: (0, 1) 1280x1024 (0x52) 108.000MHz +HSync +VSync h: width 1280 start 1328 end 1440 total 1688 skew 0 clock 63.98KHz v: height 1024 start 1025 end 1028 total 1066 clock 60.02Hz 1024x768 (0x67) 65.000MHz -HSync -VSync h: width 1024 start 1048 end 1184 total 1344 skew 0 clock 48.36KHz v: height 768 start 771 end 777 total 806 clock 60.00Hz 800x600 (0x76) 40.000MHz +HSync +VSync h: width 800 start 840 end 968 total 1056 skew 0 clock 37.88KHz v: height 600 start 601 end 605 total 628 clock 60.32Hz 640x480 (0x85) 25.175MHz -HSync -VSync h: width 640 start 656 end 752 total 800 skew 0 clock 31.47KHz v: height 480 start 490 end 492 total 525 clock 59.94Hz a@v:~$

i.e. it sees the internal screen and the one connected through DP1 but it sees the VGA-1-1 disconnected. Despite of that, it detects the VGA screen's supported resolutions. That’s really strange. Sometimes (e.g. when I start the computer without the other screen connected through DP1), it is also found VGA-1-1 disconnected, but then the lines with the possible screen resolutions of it are missing.

When looking at the screen settings under Xubuntu in the GUI, it dos not offer me the screen which is connected by VGA. The same holds for the NVIDIA X Server Settings app.

The LED on the VGA screen‘s power switch remains yellow. Normally it turns green when Sync signals are seen by the VGA screen's electronics.

Why does VGA-1-1 appear as disconnected although it is connected and the screen is powered on?

What‘s necessary to use the VGA port e.g. for a projector under Xubuntu?

I want to change the behavior of the command date (possibly by setting some proper environment variable) such that it returns its output as if it was invoked as

date --iso-8601=seconds

1. Is that possible and how does one accomplish this?
2. If one applies the searched-for trick, would it resrict the usage of the command date or would it still be possible to override my desired default behavior?

On Xubuntu 16.04.3 LTS the labels attached to the icons on my desktop could span more than one line.

Now I have installed Xubuntu 18.04.3 LTS. This version (with its default settings) truncates all labels on my desktop where a line break would become necessary.

That's quite unsatisfactory since I sometimes have similar items which distinguish themselves not in the first say 12 characters but rather in some later ones which would appear on the second or third line of the label if linebreaking would happen instead of truncation.

I have to admit that the line breaking on Xubuntu 16.04 sometimes happened in odd places, e.g. in the middle of a word, sometimes even giving rise to strange interpretations of the words... At least it was better than what I have now.

Can I tell Xubuntu not to just truncate the label but rather to provide space for say up to three lines?

It would be even nicer if Xubuntu could display labels to the icons with reasonable hyphenation... just as a matter of aesthetics.

This is the English version (including later edits) of Xfburn: fehlgeschlagen, Burn Run failed.

I use Xubuntu 16.04.6 LTS, currently with Linux kernel 4.4.0-145-generic x86_64.

Xfburn has version 0.5.4 for Xfce 4.12.

I use a Lenovo W530 laptop, the CD/DVD-RW-drive in it is shown as MATSHITA DVD-RAM UJ8C0. Xfburn shows all possible check marks for it except for "write blue ray disks".

I am using blanks of type Verbatim CD-R 700 MB 52x.

The FIFO-buffer of Xfburn is set to the maximum possible, which is 16384 kB on this installation.

I always get error messages of this type

Failed: Burn Run failed.

Usage of the FIFO-buffer shows 99%, for the device buffer 100% usage is shown.

In the configuration check marks were set for:

• Eject CD,
• Simulate,
• Burn Free,
• Stream Recording.

There was no checkmark at "only create ISO".

(I also have tried to write with a reduced speed, but that also did not work.)

What‘s wrong here?

Edits: As suggested by a comment, I start xfburn from the command line to show its error messages:

$ xfburn
** Message: 18:09:48.866: Using UDEV
** Message: 18:09:52.110: Using gstreamer transcoder.

** (xfburn:12230): WARNING **: 18:12:50.707: [FATAL] 131357: SCSI error on write(32,16): [5 30 05] Illegal request. Cannot write medium, incompatible format. (0)

** (xfburn:12230): WARNING **: 18:12:50.707: [FATAL] 131339: Burn run failed (0)

Of course, the blank used in this trial gets lost: If I re-insert the disk drawer, many CD access operations happen. One has to be very patient to let them all finish. This time the file system on the CD is not mounted after the disk is inserted and all CD operations have come to an end. I remember that Thunar showed me the content of the disk with its directory structure and file names last night. When I tried to open one of the files, another almost endless sequence of CD operations took place. But this was without a reboot happened after writing the CD. Today after rebooting and re-inserting this CD and after sudo blkid I see a line

/dev/sr0: UUID="2019-04-08-18-12-20-00" LABEL="Bilder 2019-03-1" TYPE="iso9660"

with the disk label I had given to this disk. Then I tested

$ badblocks -v /dev/sr0
Es wird von Block 0 bis 233879 geprüft
Es wird nach defekten Blöcken gsucht (Nur-Lesen-Modus):60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
...

The number of futile accesses goes on at least to 151 (I stopped it there) but surprisingly the number of read head movements between consecutive block numbers varies: sometimes it is one such noise from one number to the next one, sometimes there are several such movements.

I wonder about TYPE="iso9660" because the file names to be written to the CD were long ones, they did not follow the 8.3 name scheme known from the stone age of DOS! If I remember right, one needs something like the Joliet file system or similar to break out of the 8.3 name cage.

a) Is it possible to write CDs with xfburn with long filenames?

b) Is the presence of files with long file names or containing non-ASCII characters an explanation for this failure?

c) If the answer to a) is Yes: What do I have to do in order to write such files to a CD?

d) If there is an answer to c): Isn't it a bug of xfburn that it does not provide an error message before it actually tries to burn such files and destroys the CD blank in doing so?

I want to prepend the file modification date in the form YYYY-MM-DD_ to each existing filename (i.e. for files only, not for directories). I have seen that krusader has a multiple file renaming function which in principle allows prepending or appending such information to the existing filename and it can do this for all selected files.

However, since I use it in a Xubuntu 16.04.3 installation with German settings, the file dates are also displayed as DD.MM.YYYY and when I use the renaming function of krusader it also renames them that way.

When I use [modificationdate;yyyy-MM-dd]_ in the part of the dialog specifying to prepend the filename on the second tab of the renaming dialog, it actually uses the modification date but in addition it prepends the current date in the German locale format, e.g.

09-02-20192019-01-04_old filename.jpg

This is complete nonsense, since one does such things to have files sorted by the date expressed in the filename!

How can I suppress the additional placement of today's date (in the example the first 10 characters 09-02-2019)?

This question pertains to an installation of Xubuntu 16.04.3 LTS with current kernel 4.4.0-116-generic x86_64. I am running a Lenovo laptop W530 and the keyboard is a German one (QWERTZU).

Initial issue

I installed a new version of a commercial program which differs from all other Ubuntu programs which I used so far (including the previous version of that program) with respect to keyboard entry: It suppresses the dead keys, i.e. neither does pressing them twice produce those accents alone nor does pressing them once followed by one of the characters known with that accent after it produce the accent carrying version of that character.

Unfortunately the caret character ^, akut ´ and gravis ` are used frequently within that program. I contacted the support of that program. They could not reproduce this problem with Ubuntu 18.04 and they asked me for the exact settings of my keyboard and language settings.

Problems risen during trials to narrow down the issue

I searched long and still did not find a way how to unambiguously communicate what language settings are in effect on my computer. I am still looking for some command or what system file to list to unambiguously communicate those system settings. I only could take screenshots from the GUI programs to set the keyboard settings and to set the country settings.

In experimenting with the keyboard and in order to communicate its results in other programs (like LibreOffice, Mousepad and Thunderbird), I tried all keys in the combinations with Shift, Alt and AltGr and I carefully observed if and where there are “dead keys” (which produce an action on the next character if it is one which is used in combination with that special feature).

I found the following results:

The uppermost row below keys produces (e.g. in mousepad or Thunderbird)

shifted:        ° ! " § $ % & / ( ) = ? `
unshifted:      ^ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 ß ´
shift+AltGr:    ″ ¡ ⅛ £ ¤ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞ ™ ± ° ¿ ˛
with AltGr:     ′ ¹ ² ³ ¼ ½ ¬ { [ ] } \ ¸

row of the tab-key:

shifted:        Q W E R T Z U I O P Ü * 
unshifted:      q w e r t z u i o p ü +
shift+AltGr:    Ω Ł € ® Ŧ ¥ ↑ ı Ø Þ ° ¯
with AltGr:     @ ł € ¶ ŧ ← ↓ → ø þ " ~

row of the caps-lock key

shifted:        A S D F G H J K L Ö Ä '
unshifted:      a s d f g h j k l ö ä #
shift+AltGr:    Æ ẞ Ð ª Ŋ Ħ ˙ & Ł ̣  ˇ ˘      (the one belonging to J the last three Ö, Ä and ' and act like dead keys for certain other keys like ȧạčŏ) 
with AltGr:     æ ſ ð đ ŋ ħ ̣  ĸ ł ˝ ^ ’      (those belonging to j, ö and ä act like dead keys for certain other keys like ạőĉ)

row of the shift-key

shifted:        > Y X C V B N M ; : _
unshifted:      < y x c v b n m , . -
shift+AltGr:    ¦ › ‹ © ‚ ‘ ’ º × ÷ —
with AltGr:     | » « ¢ „ “ ” µ · … –         (the tree dots are produced by AltGr+.)

After carrying out a lot of experiments, finally I must have mixed up something since now, I can not longer produce the AltGr and the Shift-AltGr results any longer. I must have changed something inadvertently – but what the hell was it and how can I return to what I had before?

My questions

1. How do I unambiguously communicate the actual settings of my current keyboard configuration? 1a. What commands to run to communicate their output? 1b. Content of which system files shall I communicate?

2. How can I restore the working of AltGr key combinations to what I had before (documented above)?

Further question to learn programming in Ubuntu environment

If someone reading this post could give me some explanation how such dead keys are processed from a programmatic point of view: According to an article I read (referring to the new Wayland system) there are different ways for a program to learn about keyboard actions while they have the focus: One which returns the “undigested” keyboard events and one which processes “digested keyboard events”, i.e. an event only happens after the character of a dead key is pressed and the result is the character with the accent (or the accent itself if it is pressed twice or if the second character is a blank). But I do not know which of my applications uses Wayland, as far as I know, most Ubuntu applications either use GTK or they use QT and those all rely on X-Window which is probably the predecessor to Wayland. Some clarifications on the relationships between them would also be very wellcome.

3. What are the names of the functions to to be called in order to get primary “undigested” key events and what are the names for the functions to be called with “digested” keyboard actions?

This question pertains to Xubuntu 16.04 and Thunar 1.6.11

locale – a returns this:

C
C.UTF-8
de_AT.utf8
de_BE.utf8
de_CH.utf8
de_DE.utf8
de_LI.utf8
de_LU.utf8
en_AG
en_AG.utf8
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_CA.utf8
en_DK.utf8
en_GB.utf8
en_HK.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_IN
en_IN.utf8
en_NG
en_NG.utf8
en_NZ.utf8
en_PH.utf8
en_SG.utf8
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8
en_ZM
en_ZM.utf8
en_ZW.utf8
POSIX

There must be some way to have files and folders whose names start with an unterline character displayed before all other items of the same category (files or folders, separately in each category).

In Windows this is standard rightaway and there I usually use this feature to control that some very frequently used itms are always are shown at the very beginning.

After reading a thread in the German version forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/alphabetische-sortierung-im-dateimanager I played a bit with the collating sequence (keyword LC_COLLATE) but did not achieve what I want.

Also reading this hint which proposes to switch to sudo update-locale LC_COLLATE=C (which only works after logging out and in again after one has issued this command) this still has the disadvantage that it sorts file names beginning with underscore after file names starting with digits and before files starting with alphabetic characters as result of ls -l. In order to keep directories grouped together at the top of the listing, one has to use ls -l --group-directories-first.

Also the C collating sequence has the disadvantage that the usual collating order of Umlaut characters is no longer maintained. With the C collating sequence, e.g. Öffentlich goes below Vorlagen.

I guess one needs another or a modified collating sequence for German which sorts Underscore before all digits and all characters and which also sorts the Umlaut characters Ä with A, Ö with O, Ü with U, ß with s.

Is there someone in this forum who could supply us with a detailled working instruction how to achieve this goal: Not suppress underscores at the beginning of file and folder namens when sorting them for display in Thunar (and xfe, at which the disciussion mentioned above was targeted).