Jazz's questions

This is something I have noticed happening for a long time now, and I see it in various flavours of Ubuntu. At the moment I happen to be using Ubuntu Studio.

As the system boots past grub, you get a nice graphical Ubuntu Studio animated logo for a while, but then, just before the login screen appears, it drops back to the text console, where you see various things at different times (like system startup logging - as you'd see if you pressed escape while Plymouth is displaying the logo, and even a login prompt at times), but typically it at least shows the filesystem status (as clean usually), then it switches back to graphical mode for the login dialog.

It would look very much neater if it didn't flash the text console on screen like this. I am just wondering why it does this, and would like a fix? I know it's no biggy. I just get curious about odd things :)

The new "software centre" won't run after my upgrade to 16.04 last night. Trying it from the unity bar - nothing happens. I read that it should be running gnome's software manager. Trying from the command line - if I got the command right, gives this result

    $ gnome-software

(gnome-software:5748): Gs-WARNING **: failed to open plugin /usr/lib/gs-plugins-9/libgs_plugin_xdg_app_reviews.so: /usr/lib/gs-plugins-9/libgs_plugin_xdg_app_reviews.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Timeout was reached

After I log in, sometimes (often) the screen goes black and the graphical mouse arrow appears, and it can be moved with the mouse, but nothing else happens for quite a long time (maybe a minute) and then the desktop will finally appear.

This is using Ubuntu 13.10 - AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 945 Processor × 4 - 8 GiB ram - GeForce GTX 550 Ti/PCIe/SSE2/3DNOW! - 32 bit

When I run vmplayer, it detects that the kernel has changed, and as usual prompts compile and load the required modules. However, it never gets any further. When you choose install, it just quits silently with no error or any further action. What should happen is that the VMWare Kernel Module Updater should run. It doesn't.

Please note, this is not the same as the question answered here, What is the path to the kernel headers so I can install vmware?, which is due to the proper header files not being where they need to be. Mine never gets this far, and besides, I made sure I have all the latest header files for my 3.8.0-19-generic kernel.

I am trying to turn off two things in Firefox - it is re-opening every tab that was open when it was shutdown, and it always warns when I close multiple tabs.

I have altered both these behaviours in preferences (I set it to open just one defined home page on startup, and I unticked the multiple tab warning box), but Firefox is ignoring the changes.

I tried the reset Firefox button in the troubleshooting page, but it still misbehaves.

After just upgrading to 12.10, I see three Error: File Not Found lines flash up on the screen at the very start of bootup, just before the grub menu appears. The system still works properly after that.

Just wondering why, and how to fix it.

I have just started experimenting with extra lens in Unity. I installed some that I found listed in an AskUbuntu question. Some of them don't seem to work.

The "Cooking" lens is supposed to show recipes, but I just get a blank result - nothing is found.

I have another lens which I assume is the youtube lens I installed, that sits and searches forever when I switch to it, and even type a search into it.

I have a linux installation in a 50GB partition, on an old 80GB sata disk that is starting to show some errors in it's SMART status, and also, it's an old slow disk. So I want to copy it to a newer sata disk with a spare 500GB partition on it.

I tried to do it using gparted using copy/paste. Gparted starts to copy it but fails with a read error after about 9 GB. Checking the filesystem on the source partition shows no errors, but I see 3 sectors in the SMART "Current Pending Sector Count" (using Ubuntu's Disk Utility) and I am thinking they are the problem? Is there a way to force it to remap these sectors to eliminate the errors?

Is there a way to tell gparted it continue, rather than stop, when it finds a read error? Should I try a different tool?

Running 12.04. I can manually suspend the system and wake it up again, but I can't get it to suspend on inactivity automatically.

I have it set to "Suspend when inactive for" 10 minutes in systems settings > power. It just blanks the screen, but does not suspend.

Info as requested. Left system untouched at 18:30 with suspend set to 10 minutes.

kern.log and dmesg had nothing new in them.

sys.log had these extra lines

Aug 23 18:34:26 Ubuntu-desktop AptDaemon: INFO: Quitting due to inactivity
Aug 23 18:34:26 Ubuntu-desktop AptDaemon: INFO: Quitting was requested
Aug 23 18:39:01 Ubuntu-desktop CRON[3228]: (root) CMD (  [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete)

This has happened to me on both the 12.04 installs I have tried.

Sometimes, maybe 3 times a day, when I switch workspaces to go to programs I leave open in other workspaces, the Window isn't there. I find them in odd positions - for example, I just found my browser window half off the bottom of workspace 4, wrapped around to partly in the top of workspace 1.

What makes it more likely to happen appears to be when a window has a child window/dialog open. The child is very likely to be displaced randomly?

Edit: have switched off all extra workspaces - now just working in one, because I got tired of hunting down lost app windows. Either no-one else is seeing this, or else no-one has any solution.

I have an music app that reports the following when I run it

gm3u: error while loading shared libraries: libgnomeui.so.32: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I can't seem to find what package will install this library.

I see a bugfix, that I need, in launchpad here for the package for cups, but, if I understand things correctly, it is built for 12.10, and I am on 12.04.

Is it still possible to install it? If so, how can I do this?

Is it unwise to install it?

Will the fix eventually become available in the 12.04 updates if I can wait long enough, or am I forced to upgrade away from the LTS version?

I have installed jack because I want to use the LADSPA plugins available, in jackrack, for realtime audio processing. (I couldn't find any way to use them with pulseaudio)

After much effort, I managed to get pulseaudio to work at the same time by getting to act as a source/sink under jack after installing pulseaudio-module-jack. Still, as a solution, it is messy. I am wondering if I can remove pulseaudio. Will all common applications be able to use jack instead of pulseaudio? How much reconfiguring will there be? What are the tricks involved in making it work?

Any tips will be gratefully received.

I have set it to "suspend when inactive" after 30 minutes.

How does it determine whether it is inactive? Is it just user input via keyboard/mouse?

If I leave a program working away - say processing a video, which takes a long time, will it suspend after 30 minutes and stop that program? Same question for long downloads, will it suspend halfway through.

Recently I had a couple of instances of programs sending data (copies of some of my config files) out over the net. I consider this very bad form on behalf of the writers, and I want to prevent it happening in future.

One example was a program that had a command line diagnostic utility. When I ran it, it immediately gathered up a bunch of info, not only the program's own config, but the system as well, and uploaded them to a server. Some of those files might have contained data like usernames and passwords.

So, like in Windows, I would like a program that warns me when another program tries to send data, or even initiate communication over the net, without my knowledge. Ideally then I can whitelist only the programs I want to allow to do this, and the rest will be prevented by default.

Edit: I found a web page from 2007 that talks about this here

They mention three programs (Systrace, Tuxguardian and Program Guard) that used to exist, but I suspect cannot be used with the new kernels and distributions like Ubuntu any more.

Under Windows I use "Playlist Creator 3.6.2" This just about the ideal program for what I want, but under wine, you cannot access it's setup to set the feature I want the most, and that is relative paths in the playlist. Without this, playlists are not as portable across devices.

I am looking for a small standalone app that I can just drag'n'drop files onto to create playlists, but I also tried, but cannot see how, to get rhythmbox or amarok to do this.

Edit: What I want to do is to be able to sit at my computer and create (fairly long) playlists that the small linux based music player attached to my hifi system can play. Both the player, and my desktop can see the same network drive that holds the music, but see it mounted/shared differently - hence the playlists, placed in the root of the network storage, should use relative paths, then will work, no matter how it is mounted or accessed.

My Ubuntu 12.04 is installed on /dev/sda5 and Windows 7 on /dev/sda1. When I am running Ubuntu, I would like to use Virtualbox to run Windows 7 in a VM. The Windows 7 partition is 1 TB and is half full, i.e. large, so I don't want to copy it into a virtual hard disk.

I have read that it is possible to use a real hard disk for a Virtualbox VM, but the various instructions I have found differ from each other, and I can't seem to get it to work. Does anyone know a way to make it work in Ubuntu 12.04 and Virtualbox 2.1.12_Ubuntu r77245 (the latest Ubuntu installed the repos)?

Please post how it works for you as I want to retry any method that might work.

I see this error briefly at the top of a full screen console-type text screen as the computer restarts from suspend. At the start of the message is something about ATA, so I think it's to do with a hard disk restarting and something failing.

Should I worry? Everything seems to be working.

Edit: Smart status on the 2 disk drives is green, although one has a few bad sectors. I will watch it more closely.

Chromium-browser always reports it didn't shut down properly when I first start it after a shutdown/reboot.

I guess I could close it manually first before shutting down, but other apps seem to be ok with stopping themselves as the system shuts down, so why is chromium having a problem (and can it be fixed)?

I am running Unity on Ubuntu 12.04 and have started using the backup program. I can't find anywhere to manually remove old backups. I don't want to wait until the disk drive gets full, as it is also used for other things.