John Feminella's questions

I use fasd, an autocompletion utility. It has an initialization step that asks you to put eval "$(fasd --init auto)" into your .bashrc. Running this produces the following:

eval "$(fasd --init posix-alias bash-hook bash-ccomp bash-ccomp-install)"

I moved eval "$(fasd ..." out of my .bashrc and into a different file to keep my .bashrc unmodified, so that I instead just have:

In .bashrc:

source config/fasd.sh

In config/fasd.sh:

eval "$(fasd --init auto)"

When I do this, fasd no longer seems to function correctly -- namely the autocompletion no longer seems to be initialized correctly. Have I misunderstood how source works, or is this a bug in fasd?

Sometimes, for one reason or another, a program hasn't specified or included all its dependencies correctly, and starting it up results in errors indicating missing dependencies. A typical error is something like:

cannot open shared object libudev.so.0

I see a lot of answers advising people to work around such problems by making symlinks in /usr/lib or other system locations, and this does seem to often solve the problem. But I see an equal number of comments advising people that it's a bad idea. Here's one answer that's representative.

Under what circumstances is it acceptable to symlink a library to make a program work? Never? Sometimes? What if you delete the symlink after you finish running the program?

What are the the consequences of doing this?

The ca-certificates package was just updated, and it caused the following changes on my Xubuntu 13.10 system:

Running hooks in /etc/ca-certificates/update.d....
Adding debian:CA_Disig_Root_R1.pem
Adding debian:CA_Disig_Root_R2.pem
Adding debian:China_Internet_Network_Information_Center_EV_Certificates_Root.pem
Adding debian:D-TRUST_Root_Class_3_CA_2_2009.pem
Adding debian:D-TRUST_Root_Class_3_CA_2_EV_2009.pem
Adding debian:PSCProcert.pem
Adding debian:StartCom_Certification_Authority_2.pem
Adding debian:Swisscom_Root_CA_2.pem
Adding debian:Swisscom_Root_EV_CA_2.pem
Adding debian:TURKTRUST_Certificate_Services_Provider_Root_2007.pem
Adding debian:Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority_2.pem
Removing debian:cacert.org_class3.pem
Removing debian:cacert.org_root.pem
Removing debian:Equifax_Secure_eBusiness_CA_2.pem
Removing debian:TC_TrustCenter_Universal_CA_III.pem

I've decided I don't trust some of these CAs, and I would like to remove their certificates. How do I do that?

Given a set of apt commands and packages to apply (e.g. install foo bar baz, autoremove quux blerg bang), is there a way to calculate the diff of the system state that will be produced if I run the commands?

By "system state" I don't merely mean whether a given package will install/remove other packages, but what kinds of actual changes get produced -- files being deleted or moved, scripts getting run, et cetera.

This question describes how to get the changelog for a given package. However, it's the whole changelog.

What I'd like is a way to see what will be changed in whatever I'm about to upgrade. For example, I was imagining something like:

$ sudo apt-get upgrade --show-changelogs
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
  foo
    -- adds the bar feature for better snazziness
    -- removes the deprecated baz feature

1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 8,864 kB of archives.
After this operation, 285 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 

Unfortunately, I don't see anything like that in the man pages for apt-get. Does this or something similar exist?

UPDATE: I've written a short blog post talking about apt-listchanges and Debian changelogs in a little more depth that incorporates some of the feedback in this question.

Is there a package distributed through Ubuntu which will let me record either a specific window or region/rectangle of my screen, or a website which can do the same? Specifically I would like:

• Free service, or allows a free trial
• Can livecast to web and share using a link (no PINs, registration procedures, etc.)
• Lets me share a region of my screen rather than the whole thing.

I've tried a number of Java-based web tools and some Windows ones through Wine, but none seem to allow sharing a specific window:

• Screenleap (option to share window is grayed out)
• join.me (option to share window is grayed out)
• Yuuguu (can't share windows on Ubuntu)
• Screenr (doesn't seem to do live streams).

(P.S. I lack the requisite reputation to create a screen-sharing tag, so I've tagged as best as I could. Please feel free to adjust the tags as needed.)

It used to be that Ctrl + - and Ctrl + + would increase or decrease the text size of the terminal in earlier versions of Ubuntu, which is helpful when you're giving presentations and want to show your code in a larger size. I switched to Xubuntu 12.04, and I'm missing these keyboard shortcuts.

Is there an alternative I can use? Or if not, is there a way I can define my own shortcut to replace these?

Update: Happy to report that this question is now moot for recent versions of xfce4-terminal! See here.