dan's questions

Lately my Ubuntu 12 system has started acting very strange. Sometimes the computer freezes and then unfreezes 2 minutes later, and other times when I try a basic command like less I get the error bash: /usr/bin/less: Input/output error. But this is intermittent too. Any suggestions?

Also if I try sudo reboot and enter my password, I get

sudo: unable to open /var/lib/sudo/plato/7: Read-only file system

Before I used to be able to do sudo reboot fine.

If I tail /var/log/syslog I do see these curious lines:

.... ata1: softreset failed (device not ready)
.... ata1: hard resettting link
.... ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)

What can I do to fix this?

I know you can suspend a ssh session with ~^z, but is there also a way to background it so that it continues working while you do something else in the local shell?

I have USB speakers connected to my Ubuntu desktop. Because of the way the cables are attached & my floor layout, I would like to reverse the left and right speaker output. Is there a way to do this?

The notification tray at the bottom of my desktop screen gets overcrowded with notification icons after several notify-send messages appear. Is there a way to clear this tray?

I prefer no-frills Ubuntu Classic (no effects) to the new Ubuntu Unity desktop. I'm glad it's still an option in Ubuntu 11.04. But will Ubuntu keep offering the option of logging into Ubuntu Classic for the indefinite future, or is it going to be phased out? Is there an official pronouncement on this?

I have Ubuntu 11 running on a Thinkpad W520. Things work great, but not avahi-daemon. It seems that my laptop becomes invisible (ssh [email protected] can't find the laptop) to other computers on the network. Then I have to sudo service avahi-daemon restart. It seems I have to do this every day or two. Is there a way to avoid having to restart avahi-daemon so often?

I know how to switch the audio out device using the speaker menu item, but how does one do this from the command line? I'd like to write some shell scripts around this functionality.

To put the foreground job, in the background, I press cltr+Z and then bg [job-number]. Is there a way to do this in one step instead of two, with some cltr+[key] command?

And I don't mean the &. I want to put a process that I already started and am interacting with into the background.

My Wifi on my new Thinkpad W520 running Natty keeps dropping out and coming back on. Output from dmesg below. Any advice?

[30493.687552] wlan0: authenticate with e0:91:f5:ef:7b:b2 (try 1)
[30493.689127] wlan0: authenticated
[30493.689144] wlan0: associate with e0:91:f5:ef:7b:b2 (try 1)
[30493.693592] wlan0: RX AssocResp from e0:91:f5:ef:7b:b2 (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=4)
[30493.693595] wlan0: associated
[31631.172868] wlan0: deauthenticated from e0:91:f5:ef:7b:b2 (Reason: 7)
[31631.211847] cfg80211: All devices are disconnected, going to restore regulatory settings
[31631.211868] cfg80211: Restoring regulatory settings
[31631.211873] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain
[31631.215037] cfg80211: Ignoring regulatory request Set by core since the driver uses its own custom regulatory domain
[31631.215042] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated:
[31631.215044] cfg80211:     (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp)
[31631.215046] cfg80211:     (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[31631.215049] cfg80211:     (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[31631.215051] cfg80211:     (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[31631.215053] cfg80211:     (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[31631.215055] cfg80211:     (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm)
[31632.289638] wlan0: authenticate with e0:91:f5:ef:7b:b2 (try 1)
[31632.291262] wlan0: authenticated
[31632.291276] wlan0: associate with e0:91:f5:ef:7b:b2 (try 1)
[31632.295119] wlan0: RX AssocResp from e0:91:f5:ef:7b:b2 (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=4)
[31632.295123] wlan0: associated
[31886.234836] wlan0: deauthenticated from e0:91:f5:ef:7b:b2 (Reason: 7)
[31886.306735] cfg80211: All devices are disconnected, going to restore regulatory settings
[31886.306740] cfg80211: Restoring regulatory settings
[31886.306744] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain

Nothing on my Ubuntu 11 system seems to automatically open rtfd files.

I'm using pdftotext (part of poppler-utils) to convert PDF documents to text. It works, for the most part, but one thing I wish it did was to insert blank lines between separate paragraphs instead of mashing them together.

Is there way to get pdftotext to do this? And if not, is there another pdf to text utility that can do this?

The error I get is this:

GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; the most common cause is a missing or misconfigured D-Bus session bus daemon. 
See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. 
(Details -  1: Failed to get connection to session: Error connecting: Connection refused)
Failed to open bus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-BYC0LHrEHk: Connection refused

Any suggestions?

I'm running Ubuntu 11.04.

Sometimes my computer stops seeing the names of the other computers on my network.

So I can no longer log into another computer by typing the hosting name

e.g. ssh [email protected]

I can still log in using the local network IP address.

How can I get the first way to work again without rebooting? I know this problem is local to the computer.

The other computers on my network can still see one another. But they can no longer see the computer I'm working on, not even by local ip address.

For programming, I like to turn off font antialiasing (i.e. select the Monochrome option) because it makes the terminal text look a lot sharper at smaller font sizes. But then everything in the web browser looks worse.

Is there a way to have the best of both worlds, and have non-antialiased Terminal fonts, but antialiased web browser fonts?

When I have dual displays set up, or when I am using Synergy to use one keyboard and mouse across two computers/screens, I can't seem to retain F11 full screen mode for the top application when I mouse out of that screen. This applies to both the application and also to any Flash video that may be playing in full screen mode.

Is there any way to retain full screen mode and mouse out of the display?

I got a new Thinkpad X201 last week with the 6 cell battery, which is advertised to work for 5 hours. I installed Ubuntu Maverick on this machine right away. My battery life is only around 2 hours. Is this because the Thinkpad's battery power management only works well under Windows? Or can I change some configuration to make my battery last longer under Ubuntu?

I'd like to use gedit or some similar program just as a page formatter and pipe some text through it and onto the printer. | lpr just doesn't cut it in the presentation department. The printed output is subpar, even if I try to tinker with the margin and font size options. But I like the way text looks like when printed from gedit. Is there a way to have the best of both worlds and use a command line pipeline to print a text file with gedit-quality formatting?

Some times I copy something to the clipboard, and it doesn't paste with Shift+Insert, but with Ctrl+V or right-click paste. The behavior seems confusing and a bit unpredictable. Is there some logic behind the variation?

Is there a way to hide all other windows except the one in the foreground (besides manually hiding them)?

If I play a Hulu video in a browser on one monitor and then click the "full-screen" button, the video takes over the whole screen. But a glitchy copy of the video also takes over my second screen. But I'm not running my two monitors in mirror mode. I'm using a Radeon HD 4650 graphics chip.