8128's questions

I encountered this article which includes the following suggestion:

Swap and swappiness

I kept my swap partition on the old HDD. Swap on the SSD would be faster, but would also shorten the SSD’s life.

My system has plenty of memory, so I also reduced the swappiness value to 0 to tell Ubuntu to only swap when absolutely necessary. I did this by adding the line vm.swappiness=0 to /etc/sysctl.conf.

Is it true that setting swappiness to zero will increase the life of my SSD? I can't find references to this elsewhere.

I just installed quite a lot of 12.10 updates, was prompted to reboot, and then found that I couldn't boot.

My understanding is that yum, and the rpm system, is only useful on distributions such as Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS. I thought that Ubuntu, as a Debian based system, had no use for yum.

So I was surprised to find yum in the (universe section of) the official Ubuntu repositories.

When would yum be of use to an Ubuntu user?

Python2 does not suffer the same problem.

greg@greg-precise:~$ python3

Python 3.2.3 (default, May  3 2012, 15:51:42) 
[GCC 4.6.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>> from gi.repository import Gtk

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named gi.repository

(line breaks added for clarity)

As reported by Phoronix, the news from UDS appears to be that development on Unity 2D will stop, with the focus being on a single, unified implementation.

Obviously maintaining two codebases to do the same thing is not ideal. However, Unity 2D was created for a reason ("Unity 2D's goal is to provide the Unity desktop shell on hardware platforms that cannot currently support Unity's OpenGL requirements"). Why is it no longer felt Unity 2D is needed?

It's easy to maximise windows on a single monitor (press the maximise button, or drag the window titlebar to the top of the screen).

How can I maximise a window so that it takes up two screens?

My web browser opened, and I logged in. I get the message "Tomboy Web Authorisation Successful - Please return to the Tomboy Preferences window and press Save to start synchronising". So I returned to Tomboy to find the window below.

As you can see, it asks me to press save, but the save button is greyed out!

I get the window below occasionally on shutdown. Is there any way to find out what the "Unknown" program is? Perhaps find the path of the executable?

If I want my application to store a few settings, that persist when an application closes, then where should I store them?

I'm not talking anything complicated: two booleans and a string (although in the future I might want to store more complex settings)

I've heard gconf, dconf, gsettings, etc all mentioned. What is the "preferred" method? Preferably one that's nice and easy in Python.

Whenever (using flash) I make YouTube videos fullscreen then they come out not actually any bigger.

In the screenshot below you see exactly what I see when watching a video in fullscreen mode. All the black space shouldn't be there (I think). I don't see this problem in other sites, for example BBC iPlayer.

Is this standard YouTube behaviour, common on YouTube, or is it just me?

Any suggestions on fixing it?

The Ubuntu wiki describes the "sections" of the official Ubuntu repositories as follows:

Main - Officially supported software.

Restricted - Supported software that is not available under a completely free license.

Universe - Community maintained software, i.e. not officially supported software.

Multiverse - Software that is not free.

I thought that software in the Ubuntu repositories had to be open source, however doesn't the description of the Multiverse directly contradicts this?

In the GNOME System Monitor's Processes tab there is a "Waiting Channel" column. By far the most common values I see here is poll_schedule_timeout , but I also see other values: 0, do_exit, do_wait, futex_wait_queue_me, pipe_wait, __skb_recv_datagram and unix_stream_data_wait.

So what does this "Waiting Channel" column mean? And perhaps what do some of those values in it mean?

Is there any way, either through a graphical program or a command line utility to "stabilise" video in Ubuntu?

By stabilise I am referring mainly to a feature of iMovie where shaky video is analysed, and then frame by frame altered to make it look smoother. This method looses video quality through zooming and rotating to produce the effect. Look at this video for an example of what I mean.

How do I reset the font settings - actual font and size - to their default?

(I changed some values in System->Preferences->Appearance->Fonts)

This is particularly important with the new Ubuntu font in Maverick - for instance I'm interested to see what the default settings are.

I have just started at sixth form college, and I'm going to take a Computing A-level. I have been informed all the programming in the first year is in VB.NET on Windows (I believe you are allowed more freedom in the second year...)

I do have a Windows XP partition and you can download Visual Basic Express Edition for free, however I would like to know to what extent am I likely to be able to use Ubuntu (Mono or anything else) for my studies? Can anyone give me any pointers of where to start?

Realistically if this is to work I need to be able to use the same files/projects/whatever on both Ubuntu and Windows - so I can work from Windows machines at college, and more importantly so teachers can look at and mark my work! (I don't really want to make a point of asking my teacher about my Ubuntu use, I'd prefer to blend in and be a normal student...)

I recently saw this poll asking for the "Best Linux Clipboard Manager". What actually is a clipboard manager and in what situations would a clipboard manager be useful?

Are there some differences in the default clipboard behaviour of Ubuntu to other (Windows or Mac) systems?

This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here. While you are encouraged to help maintain its answers, please understand that "big list" questions are not generally allowed on Ask Ubuntu and will be closed per the help center.

Backup is incredibly important. Obviously there's no best backup tool, but a comparison of the options would be very interesting.

• Graphical Interface? Command line?
• Incremental backups?
• Automatic backups?
• Install method: In standard repositories? PPA?

By default 'mounted volumes' are shown on the Ubuntu desktop. I usually disable this (gconf-editor or Ubuntu Tweak) because I don't want, for instance, my Windows partition on the Desktop.

However this would be a useful to display USB flash data sticks or memory cards, which are not permanently mounted volumes.

So is there some way to be selective about which volumes are shown on the Desktop?

(Image: three mounted volumes I don't want, and one USB flash data stick I do)

When I first started with Ubuntu using aptitude was the 'in-thing', with some stated improvements over apt-get. Am I correct in saying that apt-get has now 'caught up' with aptitude, and it makes little difference which is used (although it is preferable to choose one or the other, and stick with it)?

Moreover, with aptitude set to be removed from a default Ubuntu install, should everyone revert to apt-get, especially when guiding new users interested in the CLI?

I know there are several video editing programs: PiTiVi, Openshot, etc

However I am unsure if I can transfer video footage from a DV tape to my computer. In other operating systems (with the correct software) I can connect my firewire camcorder or tape deck to a pc, and record the video to file in realtime.

Is this possible in Ubuntu and if so which software is needed?