cipricus's questions

I have two samba shares in Kubuntu 24.04, one on a ext4, the other on a NTFS partition.

I want to access them from Android. There, VLC can see and access them just fine, see the files, play the media. But no file manger can. Some can show the top locations and folders but not the files, and some also say ”Access denied”.

The problem seems to be with permissions.

I see this in Samba Status:

• for the one on the ext4 partition:

• for the one on the NTFS partition:

/etc/samba/smb.conf contains these lines:

;   write list = root, @lpadmin

[DEPO-VIDEO]
path = /home/cip/Mounted/Samba/DEPO-VIDEO
available = yes
valid users = cip
read only = no
browseable = yes
public = yes

[Ntfs-Depo-VIDEOOO]
path = /home/cip/Mounted/Samba/Ntfs-Depo-VIDEOOO
available = yes
valid users = cip
read only = no
browseable = yes
public = yes

chmod cannot be used it seems:

chmod -v 751 /media/cip
chmod: changing permissions of '/media/cip': Operation not permitted
failed to change mode of '/media/cip' from 0750 (rwxr-x---) to 0751 (rwxr-x--x)

Kubuntu 23.10 
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.8
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.110.0
Qt Version: 5.15.10

When pressing the "Log Out" shortcut or selecting the "Leave" option

I think it should look something like this, or so it did in Kubuntu 18.x:

as discussed here.

On the other hand, it might be the case that the background was removed in later Plasma: in Solus KDE with Plasma Version: 5.27.10 (KDE Frameworks Version: 5.115.0,Qt Version: 5.15.12) tere is no image, but there is a high level of transparency.

But in my case, no matter the theme I use, all the options appear on a dark gray background, with an almost imperceptible transparency. Can that be changed so that a wallpaper be set for this interface or that transparency be increased?

When an application is listed at snapcraft I expect snap install to be able to find it.

~$ snap find redplayer
Name       Version  Publisher  Notes  Summary
redplayer  3.1.6    edsonk     -      Player de gerenciamento de conteúdo de tv.

but:

~$ sudo snap install redplayer
error: snap "redplayer" not found

With a Freebox Pop server (see NOTE at the end: this is not limited to the Freebox server, but all samba shares are affected). It has an USB entry where I have put an external 2 GB drive containing mostly videos that I can thus access and play very well with an Android TV device (or with the phone etc).

But, to my surprise, on a rather old laptop running Kubuntu 22.04, while Dolphin can access that drive and make changes to it, video files cannot be played by the video players I normally use - VLC and MPV.

Photos are instantly opened by Gwenview.

PDFs are opened in Okular but the file is first copied on the computer it seems.

MPV gives this error:

mpv 'smb://freebox-server.local/Volume 2000Go/FILME/IT_2/---a-voir/A.Mezzanotte.Va.La.Ronda.Del.Piacere.1975.mkv' 
[ffmpeg] Protocol not found. Make sure ffmpeg/Libav is compiled with networking support.
Failed to open smb://freebox-server.local/Volume 2000Go/FILME/IT_2/---a-voir/A.Mezzanotte.Va.La.Ronda.Del.Piacere.1975.mkv.

Exiting... (Errors when loading file)

That might be ffmpeg-specific, but VLC is also unable to play:

vlc 'smb://freebox-server.local/Volume 2000Go/FILME/Les Felins_a.en-fr.mkv' 
VLC media player 3.0.16 Vetinari (revision 3.0.13-8-g41878ff4f2)
[00005558f566b640] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
[00007fbf3c0016f0] smb stream error: read failed (Broken pipe)
[00007fbf3c0016f0] smb stream error: read failed (Broken pipe)
[00007fbf3c04dc30] mkv demux error: cannot find any cluster or chapter, damaged file ?
[00007fbf3c0016f0] smb stream error: read failed (Broken pipe)
[00007fbf3c04dc30] mjpeg demux error: cannot peek
uint DBusMenuExporterDBus::GetLayout(int, int, const QStringList&, DBusMenuLayoutItem&): Condition failed: menu
uint DBusMenuExporterDBus::GetLayout(int, int, const QStringList&, DBusMenuLayoutItem&): Condition failed: menu

The snap version of VLC gives this:

env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/vlc_vlc.desktop /snap/bin/vlc
VLC media player 3.0.19 Vetinari (revision 3.0.19-0-g32b50de2a2)
[000055698c544b10] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
Qt: Session management error: Could not open network socket
[000055698c5db150] main playlist: playlist is empty
Sending netbios packet to 192.168.1.255
uint DBusMenuExporterDBus::GetLayout(int, int, const QStringList&, DBusMenuLayoutItem&): Condition failed: menu
netbios_ns_resolve, wrong query type received
uint DBusMenuExporterDBus::GetLayout(int, int, const QStringList&, DBusMenuLayoutItem&): Condition failed: menu
uint DBusMenuExporterDBus::GetLayout(int, int, const QStringList&, DBusMenuLayoutItem&): Condition failed: menu

And then, with -v argument:

env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/vlc_vlc.desktop /snap/bin/vlc -v 'smb://freebox-server.local/Volume 2000Go/FILME/Les Felins_a.en-fr.mkv' 
VLC media player 3.0.19 Vetinari (revision 3.0.19-0-g32b50de2a2)
[000055792cde9b10] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
Qt: Session management error: Could not open network socket
Sending netbios packet to 192.168.1.255
netbios_ns_resolve, wrong query type received
uint DBusMenuExporterDBus::GetLayout(int, int, const QStringList&, DBusMenuLayoutItem&): Condition failed: menu
uint DBusMenuExporterDBus::GetLayout(int, int, const QStringList&, DBusMenuLayoutItem&): Condition failed: menu

Kaffeine:

kaffeine 'smb://freebox-server.local/Volume 2000Go/FILME/Les Felins_a.en-fr.mkv' 
25-01-24 09:15:20.516 [Warning ] QCommandLineParser: already having an option named "h"
25-01-24 09:15:20.516 [Warning ] QCommandLineParser: already having an option named "help-all"
25-01-24 09:15:20.516 [Warning ] QCommandLineParser: already having an option named "v"
25-01-24 09:15:20.850 [Info    ] kaffeine.dvb: Using built-in dvb device manager
[00007fef1c001650] smb stream error: read failed (Broken pipe)
[00007fef1c001650] smb stream error: read failed (Broken pipe)
[00007fef1c050650] mkv demux error: cannot find any cluster or chapter, damaged file ?
[00007fef1c001650] smb stream error: read failed (Broken pipe)
[00007fef1c050650] mjpeg demux error: cannot peek
[000056398694af50] main input error: Your input can't be opened
[000056398694af50] main input error: VLC is unable to open the MRL 'smb://freebox-server.local/Volume%202000Go/FILME/Les%20Felins_a.en-fr.mkv'. Check the log for details.

Trying with Gwenview:

kf.kio.widgets: Failed to check which JobView API is supported "The name org.kde.kuiserver was not provided by any .service files"

Kodi allows the Freebox share location to be added, and then starts playing video (although sometimes it freezes).

I was also pleasantly surprised to see how old Xine plays very easily those videos (instantly!).

But other players also work, like Totem (Gnome's 'Videos') and Glide, installed as flatpak.

Testing in a live session of Ubuntu 22.04 (Gnome) the same problems are present with MPV and VLC - while the file manager (Nautilus) can access those files and the Gnome video player ('Videos', that's Totem I guess) can play the videos (after installing the needed codecs).

Are these problems related or should I treat them separately (MPV from VLC)?

NOTES AND UPDATES:

• kio-fuse is installed
• this is not limited (after more testing) to the Freeebox samba share, but to other samba shares too: for testing purposes I have created a samba share on my Android phone, and videos on the phone have the same problem with MPV and VLC on Kubuntu 22.04
• sharing the 'Movies' Android phone folder on FTP with Solid File Explorer, they can be played by VLC and MPV on this Kubuntu 22.04
• Beside Kodi, also SMPLayer, although using mpv as backend, can play fine the samba shared videos!
• Other mpv-based players, like Haruna and QMPlay2, don't work

On a secondary laptop I am running LTS Kubuntu 22.04 and the default Firefox snap - while for various reasons I don't use Firefox snap on my first laptop, the main one being that I can manage more easily Plasma integration of a non-snap Firefox version. But I'm ready to learn and I want to test if there's any truth in many people's dismissing of Ubuntu's (especially Firefox's) snap push.

And it started badly. The system is newly installed, updated and restarted, but what I have here is version 99 - from before the whole new-addons button! Even ESR is 115.

Normally Firefox should update itself.

sudo snap refresh

All snaps up to date.

firefox --version
Mozilla Firefox 99.0.1


snap info firefox
name:      firefox
summary:   Mozilla Firefox web browser
publisher: Mozilla✓
store-url: https://snapcraft.io/firefox
license:   unset
description: |
  Firefox is a powerful, extensible web browser with support for modern web
  application technologies.
commands:
  - firefox
snap-id:      3wdHCAVyZEmYsCMFDE9qt92UV8rC8Wdk
tracking:     latest/stable/ubuntu-22.04
refresh-date: 58 days ago, at 18:18 CEST
channels:
  latest/stable:    120.0.1-1    2023-11-30 (3504) 254MB -
  latest/candidate: 120.0.1-1    2023-11-29 (3504) 254MB -
  latest/beta:      121.0b5-1    2023-11-29 (3501) 258MB -
  latest/edge:      122.0a1      2023-11-29 (3494) 290MB -
  esr/stable:       115.5.0esr-1 2023-11-21 (3392) 253MB -
  esr/candidate:    115.5.0esr-1 2023-11-14 (3392) 253MB -
  esr/beta:         ↑                                    
  esr/edge:         ↑                                    
installed:          99.0.1-1                (1232) 163MB -

I had this solution for the question Macbook takes 20 seconds to wake up where I had to run echo s2idle | sudo tee -a /sys/power/mem_sleep in order to set /sys/power/mem_sleep to [s2idle] deep But after some update that change is not remembered after reboot, and that setting is reverted to s2idle [deep].

How can that be fixed so that the needed setting is remembered?

(Or even better - maybe someone has a better solution to the initial problem linked above.)

I wanted to try the latest Haruna player (0.10.3), but it is not available as apt installation (that is 0.9.3), and after installing the snap version I get this:

env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/haruna_haruna.desktop /snap/bin/haruna %u /snap/haruna/11/usr/bin/haruna: error while loading shared libraries: libmsrpc3.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I read here that I could try sudo apt-get install --reinstall samba-libs, but that didn't work.

Note after accepting answer:

• the intended version 0.10 was not available on snapstore, but only on flathub; the flatpak version 0.10 is not affected by this problem;
• the accepted answer refers to the only snap version available at the moment of the question (0.9), the one affected by the problem

The title is saying it all: I would like a player other than VLC to play videos that have embedded subs and hide these under my own + a background.

I use VLC much more often than I have this need for subtitle background, and, as adding removing & background in VLC is not instant, I would like to have a separate player for this rare case.

In Kubuntu 22.10 there is this option of a popup list of clipboard actions when sending a file/folder or link to the clipboard, involving the applications associated with that type of file or link.

In the file manager, Dolphin, when copying a file (which sends it to clipboard), the list coincides with the "Open with" context menu:

If a URL is copied in a browser other than Firefox (tested Falkon, Opera, Vivaldi) the same happens with copied ("clipboarded") links (I've heard that in Chrome/Chromium it works too).

New actions can be added beside the listed applications, in ":

Plasma integration addon is installed in Firefox. As far as I know, only Falkon has an UI based on Qt, the rest, including Chrome and Chrome-based, are GTK like Firefox. So this should work in Firefox.

Why doesn't it? How to make it work?

That appears when copying a URL or file if the option "Include MIME actions" is enabled in clipboard actions settings:

New actions can be added, I want to try that, but for the moment the default list is not based on the list in that setting, which is empty:

I think there was a popup by default whenever I copied something in Dolphin that I have disabled, but I don't know how I did it and how can I enable it.

I have found an image of it on the web:

• How to enable and disable it?
• Is there a way to make it popup appear with a shortcut, not automatically?

I read here that there should be some option for it in clipboard settings.

If it's this it is enabled and doesn't work.

I run Kubuntu on a Makbook Air with a rather limited drive space. Snaps take just 2.8 GB but 1 is taken by two gnome packages. What are they even doing on Kubuntu?

snap list
Name                                  Version          Rev    Tracking         Publisher      Notes
bare                                  1.0              5      latest/stable    canonical✓     base
core18                                20221103         2632   latest/stable    canonical✓     base
core20                                20221027         1695   latest/stable    canonical✓     base
core22                                20220902         310    latest/stable    canonical✓     base
cups                                  2.4.2-4          836    latest/stable    openprinting✓  -
gnome-3-38-2004                       0+git.6f39565    119    latest/stable    canonical✓     -
gnome-42-2204                         0+git.c271a86    44     latest/stable    canonical✓     -
gtk-common-themes                     0.1-81-g442e511  1535   latest/stable/…  canonical✓     -
kde-frameworks-5-98-qt-5-15-6-core20  5.98.0           9      latest/stable    kde✓           -
kde-frameworks-5-core18               5.61.0           32     latest/stable    kde✓           -
onlyoffice-desktopeditors             7.2.1            133    latest/stable    onlyoffice✓    -
scantailor-advanced                   1.0.16           3      latest/stable    ppd            -
snapd                                 2.57.6           17883  latest/stable    canonical✓     snapd

ls -lh /var/lib/snapd/snaps/
total 2,8G
-rw------- 1 root root 4,0K avril 19  2022 bare_5.snap
-rw------- 1 root root  56M nov.   5 13:27 core18_2620.snap
-rw------- 1 root root  56M nov.  22 08:42 core18_2632.snap
-rw------- 1 root root  64M nov.   1 19:48 core20_1634.snap
-rw------- 1 root root  64M nov.   7 19:28 core20_1695.snap
-rw------- 2 root root  71M oct.   1 22:21 core22_275.snap
-rw------- 1 root root  73M oct.  21 21:42 core22_310.snap
-rw------- 2 root root  56M oct.   1 22:21 cups_803.snap
-rw------- 1 root root  56M oct.  22 21:56 cups_836.snap
-rw------- 2 root root 347M oct.  11 17:49 gnome-3-38-2004_119.snap
-rw------- 2 root root 447M nov.  25 17:26 gnome-42-2204_44.snap
-rw------- 1 root root  82M avril 19  2022 gtk-common-themes_1534.snap
-rw------- 1 root root  92M juil. 25 16:42 gtk-common-themes_1535.snap
-rw------- 2 root root 438M nov.  24 09:20 kde-frameworks-5-98-qt-5-15-6-core20_9.snap
-rw------- 2 root root 261M oct.   5 21:57 kde-frameworks-5-core18_32.snap
-rw------- 2 root root 607M nov.  25 14:14 onlyoffice-desktopeditors_133.snap
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4,0K avril  8  2022 partial
-rw------- 2 root root 3,2M oct.   5 21:57 scantailor-advanced_3.snap
-rw------- 1 root root  50M nov.  29 09:55 snapd_17883.snap

Here it says that unlisted items (after that command) can be safely removed, but that the listed ones are mandatory. But I'm not sure if that's true or that I understand it correctly.

Maybe gnome snaps are needed to install other gtk snaps, while kde-frameworks are needed to install kde snaps. Is that so?

Short story: some programs, including Okular, display blank some of the pages in a specific (1000+ pages) pdf, but other programs, including some internet browsers, display all pages without blanks.

After extracting all pages as pdf, the same happens for the same problematic pages. I have uploaded one of them on DocDroid for testing. (Please download this page and see if your Okular can see its content as seen in Firefox or Vivaldi.)

Even Android viewers handle just fine those pages/files.

Longer story:

I have a pdf of an old scanned dictionary of almost 1500 page. Okular shows me that many pages are blank. See here in overview:

The same in PDF Arranger:

That hasn't been a big surprise to me, but I thought that I could clean this dictionary by removing the blank pages either with PDF Arranger, or even simpler by extracting the pages as pdf or png, deleting the blanks (more easily to identify, select and remove than with the aforementioned tool - because of their tiny size) and then re-creating a pdf out of the remaining pages.

The extracted png files were as expected and I could easily identify the blanks: they were under 2 KiB in size. Dolphin thumbnails also showed the blank pngs, close to the images seen above.

But because I have also extracted the pages as pdf I was surprised to see that Dolphin thumbnail-view of the separate pdf pages were now without any blanks! Also, there was no noticeable difference in size between the 1-page pdfs.

Opening these 1-page suspected pdf files in Okular, they were still displayed as blank, and the same happened in Qpdfviewer and PDF Aranger, but not in WPS Pdf, Master PDF, LibreOffice-Draw and Firefox: there, the content was seen, the page was not blank.

Maybe an important detail:

the extracted blank png files (which are also tiny) are fully blank, while the problematic PDF pages (with undiminished size if extracted as PDF) when seen as blank are not fully so: A FOOTER line at the bottom is still seen, and just the rest is blank.

The same command was used to extract the pages as pdf and png: pdftoppm.

Now I have identified the problematic pages and can easily test.

Printing to PDF one of these files in one of the Chromium-family browsers like Vivaldi and Opera, the resulted PDF was still a blank (to Okular and the others already affected) unless the option "print as image" was selected in their settings. - If that option is selected or if print to pdf is done in Firefox, this gives as output a pdf file that is seen normally in Okular!

Testing with other programs and summing up:

• all pages are seen by WPS PDF, Master PDF, Firefox, Vivaldi browser, LibreOffice Draw, ImageMagick, mupdf, PDF Studio Viewer

• blanks (with that footer) are displayed in Okular, Qpdfviewer, PDF Aranger, Falkon (!), Inskape, Krita

• Evince (Document Viewer) installed as snap in Kubuntu cannot open thelarge file, nor any of the separate pdf pages, but gives an error: Error opening file the.pdf: Permission denied (it opens other pdf files)

• What could the problem be?

• Can I fix this at system-level?

  Okular and Qpdfviewer are the only PDF viewers that seem affected by this (no matter the problem the files themselves might have).

I prefer to use Okular for all my pdfs.

Let's say we have a series of words separated by commas in a LibreOffice Writer odt document:

"water, air, fire, sky, cloud, rain, snow, ice, wind, sun, moon, star, mountain..."

What is the easiest method to list them in a LO Writer table separated by rows?

Trying to convert them to table (Table → Convert → Text to table → Separate text at "Other" → selecting , - the result is that the words are separated by columns (where the commas where), but not by rows.

How to separate them by rows so that they appear as a list?

I am going to do that a lot, that's why I am looking for the "easiest way". I do have a solution but I don't find it easy enough. I am posting it below as an example:

As things are, the "convert to table" option only has options applicable to an existing list with each word on a separate line.

To create the correct lines I have used the addon/extension called "Alternative searching" to replace the spaces between words with Paragraph (ending): \p.

Then, the method Table → Convert → Text to table → Separate text at Paragraph works.

I have solved the problem of my laptop waking in 20 seconds like this - see links there. I would like to understand how this works.

That solution is to somehow modify a variable in /sys/power/mem_sleep, namely s2idle to deep.

Looking at that file it contained this single line:

s2idle [deep]

which was already confusing , given both variables seemed mentioned there, one in brackets.

I didn't need to decide anything though, because, as instructed in the second comment, I haven't tried to change that file as such, but I have used the command:

echo deep | sudo tee -a /sys/power/mem_sleep

Looking again at that file it seemed unchanged though.

After restart the waking from suspend is instantaneous, but that file has the same single line s2idle [deep] that it had in the first place.

I have trusted that solution but:

• I don't know how to reverse that in case I had to

• The file seems unchanged so what changing/reversing could mean?

Maybe interesting to notice, there is a file at that location sys/power/wakeup_count which contains this single line: 20. Could those be the 20 seconds that I had experienced before?

How can I turn photos of paper documents into a scanned document? is related, but not the same, as I'm talking about pdf files. The processing of images seems complicated in the answers under the linked question, especially because it involves processing each image separately: given my pdf has hundreds of pages, the solution I expect is not that of processing/editing images, but simply of scanning digital photos and documents the way real ones are. I mean something like a "virtual scanner" for which the input would be a photo-based pdf or collection of photos and the output a "normal" scanned document. (Also the Scantailor tool recommended - also here - seems to lack a Linux version now.)

This is not about OCR and not about converting image to text.

To clarify what I mean I will post a few examples.

There are pdf files based on text, not image, and they are text files (let's say docx or odt) exported to pdf. They look ready to be printed:

The above is not what I discuss here.

What I'm interested in are the pdfs in the images below, namely the difference between scanned text pages that look too much like images and scanned text pages that look like digitized text.

The first are formed of images that look like pictures taken of book pages:

or

Such copies can hardly be re-printed on paper, as the background will be printed too.

The second ones are what one would expect from scanned text, and can be printed:

or

The picture-like pdf may already be OCR-processed and its text searchable, and still look like a collection of (page) photos: OCR is not the problem here.

What I want is the clear black-on-white look of the "scanned" pdf and the removal of all the "real" details (especially shadows) that are normal in a photo but should be absent in a printed page.

As @vanadium noticed in a comment, I am looking for a software solution that automatically cleans up pictures of a document, much alike Google Scan on a smartphone.

As @user535733 said in a comment, the problem here seems to be, at least to some extent, that of converting the greyscale (scanned/image) text to black-and-white.

Answering this question I have found that Dolphin doesn't mount Android locations, it accesses them via separate KIO processes.

An effect of that is that other file managers are not able to see the Android drive in Plasma as they do in other desktops like Xfce, Gnome and others. I have tested Double Commander, Thunar and muCommander. None has access to Android drive, while that is accessible in Dolphin.

I'm not sure if the KIO process as alternative to MTP mount point is limited to Dolphin or it is enforced by Plasma as such.

Dolphin shows a mtp:/ address for the Android location, but opening that in Thunar or in other file managers doesn't do anything.

Double Commander doesn't see the phone I guess until it is accessed in the main file manager, but after that the phone location would appear in the list of drives. It does the same in KDE, only when clicking the drive it shows an error:

The same does Nautilus:

Clicking that in Thunar has no effect whatsoever.

How could the Android drive be accessed in Plasma outside Dolphin?

(I'm in Kubuntu 20.04.)

There is the question Where are MTP mounted devices located in the filesystem? and its answers specify (as I expected and seen in other systems) /run/user/$USER/gvfs as the real mount point for my device which otherwise is showed at mtp:/My Phone/Internal shared storage/.

(I can access the phone without problems, but I would like to know the mount point because accessing the phone that way this problem HERE might be solved and because from past experience it allows more options for files in file manager right-click context menu.)

Installing gvfs-fuse,the folder /run/user/1000/gvfs/ is empty.

Where is the phone mounted then?

When transferring many or very large files it is annoying to just wait with very little information. I find it comforting to be able to see what is going on, even if I have to wait. That's why I would like to have something similar to what I see in Windows 10, namely:

1. a progress bar
2. size of file copied
3. speed of transfer
4. estimated time left
5. percentage of progress
6. a speed variation graph

I know that Dolphin has more details than others, but now I don't use KDE for the moment.

Note about the Windows 10 file manager: I have taken that as a benchmark in order to illustrate what would be the expected parameters. In fact Windows Explorer doesn't show all those parameters in all cases, e.g. while copying from an Android phone to the computer: it only shows progress and ETA. (I haven't noticed that kind of limitation in Linux.) Also, the size of file(s) copied vs total size (parameter no 2) is more limited in Windows than in Linux.

After switching audio output to a bluetooth speaker the Volume Control widget in the panel cannot be used. A manual setting is needed to select the new output in the widgets' configuration.

I could add a second instance of Volume control widget to the panel and try to use that only for bluetooth, but that looks a bit odd...

• Is there some way to make the LXQt panel Volume Control follow the actual audio output?

• Can I use a different volume control tool with that panel?