How to create a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive from terminal? Is there any way to create a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive from the terminal without using any third-party applications like YUMI, Unetbootin, Startup Disk Creator,  etc.

I tried to create a bootable Ubuntu flash drive with dd method,

sudo umount /dev/sdb
sudo dd if=/path/to/ubuntu.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

It creates files on the USB disk, but when I try to boot the USB disk it shows an Operating System Not Found error.

You can use dd.
sudo umount /dev/sd<?><?>

where <?><?> is a letter followed by a number, look it up by running lsblk.
It will look something like
sdb      8:16   1  14.9G  0 disk
├─sdb1   8:17   1   1.6G  0 part /media/username/usb volume name
└─sdb2   8:18   1   2.4M  0 part

I would dismount sdb1.
Then, next (this is a destructive command and wipes the entire USB drive with the contents of the iso, so be careful):
sudo dd bs=4M if=path/to/input.iso of=/dev/sd<?> conv=fdatasync  status=progress

where input.iso is the input file, and /dev/sd<?> is the USB device you're writing to (run lsblk to see all drives to find out what <?> is for your USB).
This method is fast and has never failed me.

EDIT: for those on a Mac ending up here, use lowercase for bs=4m:
sudo dd if=inputfile.img of=/dev/disk<?> bs=4m && sync

EDIT: If USB drive does not boot (this happened to me), it is because the target is a particular partition on the drive instead of the drive. So the target needs to be /dev/sdc and not /dev/sdc <?> For me it was /dev/sdb.
Reference: https://superuser.com/a/407327 and https://askubuntu.com/a/579615/669976

Title

  How to create a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive from terminal?

There are built-in text mode tools, that you can run from a text screen or a terminal window. dd or cp or cat can be used, but they are not safe because they do what you tell them to do without any question, and a minor typing error is enough to overwrite a drive with valuable data.

Fortunately there are also safer text mode tools, but you have to install them.

mkusb version 12 alias mkusb-dus works also in text mode (not only in GUI mode).

Install mkusb via its PPA: If you run standard Ubuntu live, you need an extra instruction to get the repository Universe. (Kubuntu, Lubuntu ... Xubuntu have the repository Universe activated automatically.)

sudo add-apt-repository universe  # only for standard Ubuntu

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mkusb/ppa  # and press Enter
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mkusb mkusb-nox usb-pack-efi

Installing this way will add not only mkusb but also some program packages that mkusb depends on.
If you want a small tool or if you don't like PPAs or don't want any extra program packages, you can use mkusb-min. This shellscript is very small compared to the other versions, yet it serves the purpose to wrap a safety belt around dd.

$ wc mkusb-min
 208  736 5435 mkusb-min

It should be rather easy to see what the shellscript is doing simply by reading it in a text editor.

Download mkusb-min from its Ubuntu help page. Run it locally or install it into a directory in PATH.
xorriso-dd-target is a new tool, intended to be uploaded to a Debian repository. The purpose is to make it very safe to create boot drives (USB pendrives or memory cards). A special feature is the plug-in method to identify the target device. The man page is available here. In January 2020 there is not yet any installer, but you can copy and paste from the links above and install the shellscript and man page manually.
Finally I want to mention bootiso which is described by its developer in another answer.

Question

  Is there any way to create a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive from the
  terminal without using any third-party applications like YUMI,
  Unetbootin, Startup Disk Creator, etc.

If we must look for text mode tools that are already installed in Ubuntu, I am afraid that there are no safe tools available. So in this case I can only suggest that you use dd or cp or cat according to many of the other answers here. But please check and double-check that you are really pointing to the intended target device before pressing the Enter key.

(By the way, the Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator belongs to Ubuntu (is not third party), but it needs a graphical desktop environment or at least a graphical window manager.)


How to change shortcuts for moving windows to the screen edges? I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 under gnome-shell. When I press Ctrl-Alt-KP_Left, the active window moves to the left edge of the screen, likewise for right, up, and down. KP_5 maximises/restores the window. (Fascinatingly, moving the window to the left or right at the same time moves it down a bit each time.)

I don't like that, as it interferes with certain Eclipse shortcuts, but I can't find a place to change these settings. In gconf-editor, I navigated to /apps/metacity/window_keybindings and found that move_to_side_e was set to SuperKP_Left, and so on. I changed all these to disabled, to no avail (I tried logging out an in again.)

How can I change these shortcuts?

I just came here looking for this in GNOME 3.14, and you can simply change it in Settings (click in the top right-hand corner, and then the tools icon) by going to Keyboard, then the tab "Shortcuts", on the left-hand side click "Windows" (since we're talking keyboard shortcuts to manage windows) and set them for "View split on left" and "View split on right". Same for "Maximize window".

Have a look at Put plugin in CompizConfigSettingsManager, "Bindings" tab, "Put within viewport" section.


Ubuntu 12.10 and Android bluetooth pairing problem I'm trying to pair my Android device (Galaxy Wonder Android version 2.3.6) to my Acer Aspire 4741G running Ubuntu 12.10 via bluetooth. Both my phone and the laptop discover one another, but when I start pairing with my phone it generates a pairing request with a passkey but no dialog that asks me to enter the pass key appears on the laptop so pairing fails, when I start pairing via the laptop by adding a new device, it discovers my phone but no pairing request appears on my phone so pairing fails too.
Any help?

If it sees the device, select the device.
Pin Options, choose  custom, type in whatever number you want, then Ok.
It will ignore your custom passkey but send a pin to the device, accept on the device and tell Ubuntu it matches.  The device should pair.  I've tried this with Nokia and Samsung devices and successfully paired them.

You may need to type in a 5-digit custom pin to get it to send the pin to the device. A 4-digit pin didn't work but a 5-digit custom pin did get it to send a different pin and display it on the pc as well.
VeryNewbie


Reduce the Mouse Sensitivity Is there anyway to reduce the mouse sensitivity in Ubuntu 12.04?

I've used the slider on the systems settings to set it to the lowest point but it's still too fast.

looking for mouse device id or name

$ xinput --list
⎡ Virtual core pointer                      id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ A4Tech USB Full Speed                     id=10   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ A4Tech USB Full Speed                     id=11   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                     id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard               id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=7    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ CHESEN USB Keyboard                       id=8    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ CHESEN USB Keyboard                       id=9    [slave  keyboard (3)]

setting mouse sensivity

$ xinput --set-prop 10 "Device Accel Constant Deceleration" 4

don't know why there are two same names so have choosen id by random. and it worked out.

telling system to do this after logging in

create script:
#!/bin/bash
xinput --set-prop 10 "Device Accel Constant Deceleration" 4
xinput --set-prop 10 "Device Accel Velocity Scaling" 1

then run command:
$ gnome-session-properties

and add the script to the list.
don't forget about chmod +x.

information was found here and here.

in terminal type

vi mouse.sh

then paste your config in

xinput --set-prop 12 "Device Accel Constant Deceleration" 5

quit and save

then do

chmod +x mouse.sh

then in gnome-session-properties put the mouse.sh file in.

then you're done.


Unstable wifi on Ubuntu 20.04 Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 After restarting the laptop, the wi-fi remains at the level of 50-60 Mbps, but after a while it starts to fall to 10 Mbps, then it is in a constant interval from 3-30 Mbps (the reason for such instability is not clear). At the same time, for example, loading a page can take a long time, but watching a video on YouTube (without rewinding) in 1080 can be done without problems (while maintaining quality).
This problem is seen only under Linux. There were no problems in Windows.
 - lspci
07:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 31)

 - lspci -nnk | grep -A2 0280
07:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [168c:0042] (rev 31)
    Subsystem: Lenovo QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [17aa:0901]
    Kernel driver in use: ath10k_pci

After reboot speed.
watch iwconfig

After some time. It may seem that the Internet speed is normal, but at the beginning of the test the speed was 2-3 Mbps, then it began to grow to 50 and at the end it was 60. This can be seen on the chart.

Next test.

After much research, I came to the only method that helped me -> Wifi slow, temporarily fixed by resetting the connection.
I will leave the answer here, as I will supplement it if I encounter same problems in future.

Set channel width on the router to 20 mhz in the 2.4GHz.
Choose a specific channel, not automatic on the router(i choise 11).
Set your regulatory domain if it not done yet.

sudo iw reg get

If you see 00, then find your ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2, for example i will use UA - Ukraine, and you use your country code.
Next use that command
sudo iw reg set UA

Next set it permanently
gksudo gedit /etc/default/crda

You will see something like REGDOMAIN=. Set it to your country code.
REGDOMAIN=UA

If you want to check the stability of your internet connection, then use the following command. and pay attention to the parameter
ping 8.8.8.8

This is how I tested the changes. Before these changes, the time difference was huge, after - no.
After all this, the wifi works almost perfectly. Since it worked perfectly on all other devices before these changes, I believe that the problem was in my software on ubuntu, so I will leave this question and answer here.

It's a driver issue. It looks like easiest way to fix it is to replace the Wi-Fi module from Qualcomm with one from Realtek or some other vendor.


gtk-key-theme Emacs: what keystroke is for select-all? I prefer emacs keystrokes, but select-all doesn't seem to be part of the emacs vocabulary, or at least, the gtk-key-theme for emacs. M-w isn't working to copy the selected region.

What's the keystroke for select-all?
Where is a key binding map for this theme?

Thanks,
Steve

There is a simple binding for "Select all" in gtk: C-/

It’s defined as a general GtkTextView signal and not specifically part of the emacs key theme. But it works fine with it. It's defined as an alternative to C-a. While the latter gets reinterpreted by the emacs theme C-/ remains valid for "Select all".

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsNewbieKeyReference#toc8 appears to be what you're looking for ( C-x h after setting marker )

Also, depends on whether you want the 'page', or buffer, etc.


Right path to CPP SDK for using it in IntelliJ Idea's cpp-project I can't find the right path to CPP SDK which is required by IntelliJ Idea, IDE that I want to use for developing a C++ project. Could someone show me the right place?

If your gcc is /usr/bin/gcc, I have set it to /usr/bin.

The only way to run is right click on main cpp file and say compile the cpp.

This compiles as well as runs the a.out file.


Uninstalling Skype 4.1 from 12.10 I want to completely uninstall Skype 4.1 from the terminal.  How do I do that.  Also, do I have to delete anything else to make sure I have removed it completely?

From the terminal, run:

sudo apt-get purge skype*
sudo apt-get autoremove

Then you can remove the config files:

rm -fr ~/.Skype

That should do it.

Run:

sudo apt-get remove skype skype-bin


ShadowSocks client doen't work I just installed Shadowsocks on my ubuntu server. I can connect to the server via Android or Windows.

But I can't connect to the Shadowsocks server via my Ubuntu Desktop!
I have installed ShadowSocks client as the below link said.
https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks-qt5/wiki/Installation

I get this error:

Initialising ciphers...
AES-256/CFB (aes-256-cfb) initialised.
Running in local mode.
TCP server listen failed.

what should I do?

Try install Python-pip first by Opening up a terminal windows. Then entering the followings command sudo apt-get install python-pip Then, install
shadowsocks by again entering this commandsudo apt-get install shadowsocks


Install Python 2.7.8 on Ubuntu 12.04 I have to use Ubuntu 12.04 for some reason. In the other hand, i have to use Python 2.7.8 but the newest python version for 12.04 is 2.7.3. Is there any ppa repository i can use to upgrade my python or other simple way to do this?

Thanks in advance..

There is a ppa for Python 2.7.10 which is relatively new. Please, read description here:

https://launchpad.net/~fkrull/+archive/ubuntu/deadsnakes-python2.7

Add PPA repository

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fkrull/deadsnakes-python2.7

Update package list

sudo apt-get update

Then Install it

sudo apt-get install python2.7

All versions of Python are available on Python web site. For the version 2.7.8, the download page is: https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7.8

If you don't know how to install Python from the repository, you can use EasyInstall. This page explains how to install it and use it - it's very simple to use.


How to list all enabled services from systemctl? How can I list all enabled services from systemctl?

I know running systemctl command by itself lists all services, but I would like to only get the enabled ones.

systemctl list-unit-files | grep enabled will list all enabled ones.

If you want which ones are currently running, you need systemctl | grep running.

Use the one you're looking for.  Enabled, doesn't mean it's running.  And running doesn't mean it's enabled.  They are two different things.

Enabled means the system will run the service on the next boot.  So if you enable a service, you still need to manually start it, or reboot and it will start.

Running means it's actually running right now, but if it's not enabled, it won't restart when you reboot.

In addition to the current answers, I use the following to get just the names of the services:
systemctl list-units --type=service --state=active,running | awk '/.*\.service/ {print $1}'

Rather than the tabular format, this makes it easier to pipe just those services to another program


Windows 10 + Ubuntu dual boot - Windows can't boot I have a motherboard with UEFI (Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H with latest UEFI).
I installed Windows 10, then installed Ubuntu 17.04 with dual boot option.

Ubuntu would boot, but due to no overscan options working for my LCD TV, I went to boot Windows.  Windows proceeded to try to repair itself, and failed; startup repair fixes nothing.  I want to find out how to boot Windows without wiping the hard drive.

I think you need to install boot-repair. type these commands in the terminal to install boot-repair:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair

now launch the boot-repair by typing "boot-repair" in the terminal, Then click the "Recommended repair" button. When repair is finished, reboot and check if you recovered access to your OSs. i hope it will work. because it worked for me.


Need a non-X terminal for the nvidia driver installation When I try to install the nvidia driver for my video card, I receive an error message.

ERROR: You appear to be running an X server; please exit X before
       installing. For further details, please see the section INSTALLING
       THE NVIDIA DRIVER in the README available on the Linux driver
       download page at www.nvidia.com.

I wasn't able to find the README on the website but how do I create a terminal that is non-X?  I am on 12.04.

Do the following:

Press Alt + Ctrl + F1.
login using your id / password
stop the lightdm by sudo stop lightdm
Now install the nvidia driver. If you are using open source driver you might need to restart once and run the steps again.

Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 and log in. Press Ctrl+Alt+F7 to switch back to X.


~/.Xauthority required but missing I've now run into two instances where I've received errors because the ~/.Xauthority file is required but is missing from my user folder. I have read that the .Xauthority file has been deprecated, and the function has moved to:

/var/run/gdm/auth-for-<USER>-<RANDOM_CHARACTERS>/database`

I have attempted the solution provided in How do I create the .Xauthority file?. Which suggests I make a symbolic link from $XAUTHORITY to ~/.Xauthority upon startup. But this method has has not worked for me. I've also tried running that command and variations of it in the terminal, but without success. I am running, in vmware workstation 8, a minimal install of ubuntu server 11.10 64bit with xfce4 on top.

The error, "Unable to copy the user's Xauthorization file", I've received twice now. First when attempting to open a root terminal from the Thunar context menu, using the 'custom action' feature, with the commandgksu "xfce4-terminal -default-working-directory=%f". Then again, when attempting to install truecrypt, which gives me the error a few steps into the installation process.

Is there another way to go about this? And, more fundamentally, why do applications still rely on this file if it has been deprecated? Since they do, why isn't a link provided by default until the software catches up? I understand things are not always so tidy, and also that I may be missing something important and basic, so please forgive my impudence.

The location of the X cookie file is indicated by the XAUTHORITY environment variable.
~/.Xauthority is the default location of the X cookie file, when the variable is not present in the environment. If an application looks for ~/.Xauthority when XAUTHORITY is present, it's buggy. ln -s "$XAUTHORITY" ~/.Xauthority should work, though¹. If it doesn't work, tell us what happens: copy-paste the error message; or if you get no error message, tell us the output of ls -l "$XAUTHORITY" ~/.Xauthority.

Note that when you are running commands as root through sudo, the XAUTHORITY variable is removed from the environment. You should avoid running commands as root. For example, don't run gksu "xfce4-terminal" to run a terminal emulator as root. If you really want to run a shell as root, open an ordinary terminal, and run sudo -s inside it.

¹  Unless your home directory is shared (typically over NFS) between several Linux machines.

I had the same error message when trying to launch GUI apps with gksu.

I just figured out that you can log out, then select Ubuntu on Xorg session. It will be good then.

I could open GUI programs with gksu after doing that.

I Hope this will fix your problem.


Need to configure 4 Serial ports virtualbox guest win machine (my host is ubuntu 11.10) I have an application that run's on winNT and requires the APCI-7500 card (a 4-multiport serial card), so I've installed the winNT thru virtualbox, but as i try to configure the serial ports I notice that virtualbox shows only 2 serial ports, only 2 tabs in the ports configuration section.How can I add the other 2 ports and configure them.
My host is ubuntu 11.04
My guest is winNT
My virtualbox version is 4.0.4_OSEr70112

I'll appreciate any help.
Thanks in advance.

I've followed these threads but still get no light in this issue
How to access serial ubuntu host serial port on VirtualBox guest OS
Can't access host serial port on VirtualBox Winxp

I'm afraid it looks like you are not going to be able to use that application under VirtualBox:

If your app really requires access to the APCI-7500 card it won't work. VB doesn't emulate PCI devices. It does emulate serial ports, but it just connects them to linux ports.

If you just need lots of serial ports, it won't work. VB only supports up to two serial ports per virtual machine.

There are some workarounds, like tweaking the VB source, or emulating the serial ports with (virtual) usb devices that can work or not in your case.

Don't bother with the emulated ports of the host, forward the APCI-7500 PCI device to the guest, then install its drivers inside Windows.

This should work in all current versions of VirtualBox.

Also consider that host and guest might need to be both the same architecture, e.g. 32-bit.


12.04 LTS, tried making bootable USB stick, Startup Disk Creator erased my backup drive! I used Startup Disk Creator to try and make a bootable USB ubuntu stick to install on my new ultrabook.

I had my 2TB backup USB drive attached, as I had just backed up everything on the flash drive.

I ran the Startup Disk Creator (as detailed here: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-ubuntu ).  I selected the appropriate ISO (which was surprisingly also pre-selected), and I checked the "Device to Use" and confirmed that it was the correct drive (by name).  I clicked "Erase" to clean the drive.

A few minutes went by, and I saw activity on my USB drive.  I thought perhaps it was formatting instead of erasing.  Then I noticed that my backup drive activity was churning...not a good sign.

Worst possible thing was true, the startup disc creator was erasing my 2TB backup drive.

I have been googling to see what to do, and what exactly "erase" does in Startup Disk Creator.  I am currently running testdisk and doing a deep scan, as the quick scan did not show a partition with files.

What did I do wrong with the Startup Disk Creator?  How could it erase a disc that wasn't selected in the "Devices" dropdown?  What exactly did it DO when it erased, and is my data completely hosed or can I expect this long deep scan to bear fruit?

How could it erase a disc that wasn't selected in the "Devices" dropdown?

It is a bug in  'startupdisk creator'. The list box in startup disk creator shows only the first usb device in the destination. But it selects the last device. So when you saw the destination you would have noticed your flash drive, but actually the 2TB hardisk was selected. This will be visible only when you scroll down or maximize the window.

What exactly did it do when it erased?

The program may have tried to erase or format the drive, but it couldn't do it due to some reasons and  it managed to corrupt the data by deleting whatever was possible like partition-table and has left the data to an unrecoverable state. Or maybe it might have even formatted the disk and deleted the data and left something to show up in the drive properties.

Is my data completely hosed?

Your data is gone forever and there is nothing you can do to retrieve them with the same folder structure. But you can use the recovery software like potorec, scapel, foremost, recurva etc. to get pieces of your data. Some recovery software might also retrieve you the 100% of data. But still that wouldn't be what you expected.

can I expect this long deep scan to bear fruit?

If you are referring to the deep scan in testdisk, then the answer is no.

But there is one important thing that you should do first. Get an empty hardrive of 2TB or more and make a clone of the affected one using dd command. This does not recover you data, it helps to have a backup of the affected disk. Do every experiments that you want to do using the different recovery methods only on the cloned drive.


I have been facing problems in instaling MeteorJs via terminal in Ubuntu 16.04 I have a Ubuntu 16.04 installed in my system,
when i try to install meteor via terminal using the command

sudo curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh

I recieve the following in my terminal

~$ sudo curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh

 % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  6675    0  6675    0     0   3333      0 --:--:--  0:00:02 --:--:--  3334
Downloading Meteor distribution
                                                                           1.1%
curl: (56) GnuTLS recv error (-9): A TLS packet with unexpected length was received.

gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
Installation failed.

Check your internet connection. Try again over different network. Still not working?

Sometimes, although a response might leave the server in peace, it does get to us in pieces (I mean as incomplete)

You can do this:

Visit https://install.meteor.com/
Press Ctrl + S to save as meteor.sh
Change directory to where you downloaded the file to,
You may have to chmod +x ./meteor.sh then run..
sudo ./meteor.sh

Thanks @rexford for the answer. I am running Ubuntu 14.04 (LTS), had the same issue.

I fixed the problem following the steps bellow-

Visit https://install.meteor.com
Save the file- press Ctrl + S as meteor.sh
Open terminal and change the directory to where you downloaded the file
Run this command to make the file executable: chmod 755 meteor.sh
Now execute the file: ./meteor.sh. Here sudo is not necessary.


Find lock screen package in Ubuntu 19.04 I want to report a bug in a lock screen. So i need to find a corresponding package.

According to this wiki
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingScreenLocking/HowScreenLockingWorks
this package should be called gnome-screensaver
I tried to find an exact package name, but i could not. I have used following commands:

apt list --installed | grep screensaver
apt list --installed | grep gnome

The link you provided is pretty old. gnome-shell uses gdm3 instead of gnome-screensaver now.

try the following:

apt list gdm3

gives me:

Listing... Done
gdm3/disco,now 3.32.0-1ubuntu1 amd64 [installed]
gdm3/disco 3.32.0-1ubuntu1 i386

As you can see, it says above that it is installed.


error in disk partitioning during ubuntu server 12 installing I'm installing ubuntu server-12 on my computer that has a 2 GHz intel processor, 2 GB RAM and 160 GB Sata hard drive. I'm installing from a CD. Everything goes fine; however when I get to partitioning the hard drive, I get this (I'd post the image, but ask ubuntu doesn't let me yet):

[!!] Partition disks
       ??? ???

Make sure Ubuntu can see your hard-drive('s), are your Hard-drive('s) connected to a raid? if so find out if your raid controller is compatible.

If not try and boot from a live disc and format the hard-drive('s) from within ubuntu.

If that fails try using partition magic (or any other hard-drive checking software) to test your drive as it may just be a dead hard-drive


How to kill a single thread from Terminal in Ubuntu? I'm new to Ubuntu and new here. I need to know this.

How do I kill a single thread from Terminal in Ubuntu?
I have mozilla opened and it has 45 threads. I want to kill one of it.

I've already search many sources online but to no avail. Can anyone help me?

You can't. Not without killing the whole process. From man 3 pthread_kill, a function used for signal handling:

NOTES
   Signal dispositions are process-wide: if a signal handler is installed,
   the  handler  will  be  invoked  in  the  thread  thread,  but  if  the
   disposition  of  the signal is "stop", "continue", or "terminate", this
   action will affect the whole process.

Also see this U&L post.

In terminal type:

kill -9 "pid number for the process"

For example:

kill -9 5624 (number 9 is the code for kill signal)

To get the PID number for the process either use:

ps -eLF

or you could use the command:

top

Every process will have it's own PID number. The reason for this is because processes can be named the same.


How can I mount a drive that does not want to mount? I started off with previous versions of Lubuntu and settled on 14.10, using the box as a file server and/or torrent box. I upgraded from smaller to larger hard drives over time. The last hard disk drive (HDD) was 750 GB, but it seemed to have problems mounting and booting.

There were also problems recently with copying data to and from it. I assumed that it was time to upgrade the drive. I picked up a 2 TB HDD to replace it. I would like to mount the old drive and copy data from the 750 GB to the 2 TB. The 750 GB is attached with an external USB attachment. The drive will not mount.

Since it had trouble auto-mounting to boot, I assumed that it would have trouble mounting normally. It did not auto-mount when plugged in with USB. I used the disk program, and it shows that the HDD is detected, but it is not mounting. I get a little spinning wheel. If I cancel the action, I get an error:

  Error mounting /dev/sdg1 at /media/xxxxx/089e669d-ac89-4f0d-9490->09ad16a79b3b: Operation was cancelled (g-io-error-quark, 19) (udisks->error-quark, 0)

The file server was my original backup location. I do not have a second or third backup of the data, and I do not want to lose any of the data that is on the 750 GB HDD. What other options can I try?

If I become able to mount, but not copy, should I try to do some computer forensics activities to try and recover the data?

fdisk -l shows:

Device     Boot      Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sdf1  *          2048 1458878463 1458876416 695.7G 83 Linux
/dev/sdf2       1458880510 1465147391    6266882     3G  5 Extended
/dev/sdf5       1458880512 1465147391    6266880     3G 82 Linux swap / Solaris

I cannot mount with the terminal. Here is my error:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdf,
      missing codepage or helper program, or other error

Here is the result from dmesg | tail:

[91643.058809] usb-storage 1-5:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[91643.064175] scsi7 : usb-storage 1-5:1.0
[91644.064948] scsi 7:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ST375033 0SV                   PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
[91644.066169] sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0
[91644.073173] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdf] 1465149168 512-byte logical blocks: (750 GB/698 GiB)
[91644.074192] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off
[91644.074201] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdf] Mode Sense: 00 38 00 00
[91644.075952] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdf] Asking for cache data failed
[91644.075962] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdf] Assuming drive cache: write through
[91644.138675]  sdf: sdf1 sdf2 < sdf5 >
[91644.144813] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI disk

Looking at the disks program, I see that my partition1, which should have been ext4 is showing up as unknown. I see the button for delete partition, and more actions, but do not have the 'mount' button. Is it possible to have corrupted the partition from clicking buttons within this program to see what options are available? Is it possible to recover data from an unknown partition?

I see a problem with your commands: /dev/sdg1 in the 1st error. /dev/sdf in the 2nd error. g-io-error-quark, 19 means "Method name you invoked isn’t known by the object you invoked it on." So I would assume your 1st command has an invalid device and it should be /dev/sdf1.

Regarding the superblock error: start here and read the link in post 2

  So how the hell you are gonna Surviving a Filesystem Failures? Most of time fsck (front end to ext2/ext3 utility) can fix the problem, first simply run e2fsck - to check a Linux ext2/ext3 file system, first unmount /dev/sdf1 then type following command :

# e2fsck -f /dev/sdf1

  Is it possible to recover data from an unknown partition?

Yes as explained above: fschk can be used to fix your partition

More convenient terminal mounting:

udisksctl mount -b /dev/sdg1

(Or maybe another block dev name. udiskctl dump prints information to help you find out.)


Desktop doesn't remember brightness settings after a reboot Every time I reboot my machine the brightness goes back to 100% in Gnome. I wish it would keep the last setting. Is there anyway?

The file /etc/rc.local should look like this:

#!/bin/sh -e
#
# rc.local
#
# This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel.
# Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other
# value on error.
#
# In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
# bits.
#
# By default this script does nothing.
echo 0 > /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness
exit 0

Per @zerdo: In my dell studio 1558 the brightness setting is stored in /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness.  Just change the path if your computer doesn't use the acpi_video0 folder.

Also, per @Nick :
If this is the only answer you read, note that the 0 in echo 0 is going to be your default brightness setting. I had set this up and it was driving me crazy for a long time : every time I booted up, it would set it to the lowest brightness setting. I prefer mine to start at max brightness, so I used echo 10 instead. Your hardware might vary in brightness scale.

Run

echo 2 > /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness


How to install Toggl Desktop client? Can anyone tell how to install Toggl desktop client on Ubuntu?

Open terminal ( Ctrl + Alt + T) and run the following commands

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:official-toggl/ppa
 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install desktop-Toggl

This will install Toggl Desktop Client

Just download the installer .deb file based on your OS architecture (32bit or 64bit) and run it on your computer. See the support page for more help

Toggl on Launchpad


How can I delete conky from my system? I installed "conky" recently, but I'd like to unistall it now.
I tried:

sudo apt-get remove conky
sudo apt-get purge conky

After running these commands were, I can still run conky from the terminal.

How can I actually remove it?

Finally, I found a solution,

sudo apt-get --purge remove conky conky-all

Thanks for your efforts :)

if those commands didn't work just install Synaptic Package Manager

sudo apt-get install synaptic.

It is a very useful tool for downloading, installing and removing packages I tried it on my conky and it worked like charm.

Edit:
Edited this answer because I don't have enough reputation to join in the conversation bellow. There are multiple conky packages: conky, conky-all, conky-std. If you installed sudo apt-get install conky-all, then you can't uninstal just conky you have to run sudo apt-get purge conky-all, try that.


Trying to download ubuntu I have been trying to download Ubuntu onto a new SSD drive, all seemed well until it asked me to restart, then I just got a blank screen on my monitor, so thinking something was wrong.I turned the PC off to restart again but I'm still not getting anything on screen but computer seems to be running in the background for about an hour now, do I need to start again from scratch or is that not possible?

Please, restart the installation process...
And when the system asks to restart allow it to restart (Or take option to restart).
Should there be any problems with installation, the setup will have them handled if you're connected to the Internet.


How do I disable the guest session? How do I disable the guest session in Ubuntu 11.10 or higher? I don't want people to be able to use my computer without using a password to log in!

Updated: 2016-Aug
For Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (15.10 or later)
Adapted from: LightDM Ubuntu Wiki - Configuration

System provided configuration files in /usr/share/lightdm/ are not intended to be user editable. Instead users should use: /etc/lightdm/
Newer versions of LightDM (Ubuntu 15.10, or later) use [Seat:*] instead of [SeatDefaults]

Just run this (once) at terminal:
sudo sh -c 'printf "[Seat:*]\nallow-guest=false\n" >/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/50-no-guest.conf'

To undo (restore Guest option), remove the file created:
sudo rm /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/50-no-guest.conf

For Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (up to 15.04)
Adapted from: Ubuntu Forums - lightdm config files location in 14.04
Just run this (once) at terminal:
sudo sh -c 'printf "[SeatDefaults]\nallow-guest=false\n" >/usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/50-no-guest.conf'

You will no longer have 'Guest' as login option, on your next login.
To undo (restore Guest option), remove the file created:
sudo rm /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/50-no-guest.conf

For Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (up to 13.10)
Simplest method.
Just run this (once) at terminal:
sudo /usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-set-defaults -l false

You will no longer have 'Guest' as login option, on your next login.

This simply appends allow-guest=false to /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.

Should work from 11.10 onwards (since these use LightDM as well).

To undo (restore Guest option):
sudo /usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-set-defaults -l true

Open Terminal

gksudo gedit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

Add the following line

allow-guest=false

Save and exit the file.


Xdebug + Netbeans on Ubuntu I'm trying to debug my code using xdebug in NetBeans, but it's unresponsive. I'm using the current releases of Netbeans and Ubuntu.

I was able to get xdebug on ubuntu working with phpstorm and netbeans 7.2 , refer to this post on how to configure this. This is the tutorial i < href="http://purencool.com/installing-xdebug-on-ubuntu">followed.


Ubuntu "USB for OS X" instructions doesn't create bootable USB drive iMac i3 running 10.6.8

I've downloaded the 12.0.4 32-bit Intel ubuntu.iso and converted it to ubuntu.img and moved to root.
The "USB for OS X" instructions say insert USB Flash media.

My flash media is FAT32.

But, if one were to use Disk Utility to Erase, what format is correct: FAT, ExFAT, Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitivity), or Mac OS Extended?
Found the drive: /dev/disk1 and unmounted OK.
Issued: sudo dd if=/ubuntu.img of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=1m
The copy goes fine, BUT at the end I get a OS X message that The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.

This is not in the Ubuntu instructions. So, I choose the Ignore option.
Issued: diskutil eject /dev/disk1 and restart with Option held down.

No USB drive shows up to boot from. Eventually I get an "Unrecognized Disk" error. I'm not surprised because my memory is that to get a bootable drive for a Mac requires some version of the correct OS X to be on the disk.

Yet, the folks who wrote these instructions would certainly know this fact -- yet their instructions don't work.

Spent half the day on this but finally have a solution: The application unetbootin will quite happily open up the iso file, extract everything and create a bootable USB stick.

I'm actually not surprised Ubuntu's instructions don't work for creating a bootbale USB for Mac. I thought about it some more and eventually figured out that these instructions were to create the bootable drive if you're using a Mac computer, and I know this because in Disk Utility, my 4 gigabyte Verbatim USB flash drive is formatted as MS DOS (FAT) with a partitioning map scheme of Master Boot Record which is not recognized as boot media under OS X.  So in short, the instructions are severely misleading, because any Mac user would likely assume these instructions would be for creating the bootable media to work with OS X, but it'd only work with Windows. What gives it away even more is Ubuntu's lack of regards for making the USB bootable through your operating system's native partitioning program, ergo, Disk Utility or Computer Management for Windows users.  At first I thought it was because they made the assumption you would know how to make the drive bootable (I didn't) but then I figured out why the guide was sorely lacking... Terminal does all the work for you. So I've since given up in making my USB bootable, it's clear that Mac computers are very closed sourced as far as software and hardware goes, Linux was always meant for PC computers, not Macs.


How do I change the GRUB boot order? I have both Windows 7 and Ubuntu installed on a shared machine. Because a lot of the non-developers use Windows, I'd like to change the boot order to make it easier for them.

Currently the boot order looks like the following:

Ubuntu 11.10 kernelgeneric *86
Ubuntu 11.10 kernelgeneric *86 (safe boot)
Memory test
Memory test
Windows 7 on /dev/sda6

How do I change the default order so that Windows 7 is at the top of the list?

Windows 7 on /dev/sda6
Ubuntu 11.10 kernelgeneric *86
Ubuntu 11.10 kernelgeneric *86 (safe boot)
Memory test
Memory test

You can use an easy-to-use the GUI application called Grub Customizer to make your life a little bit easier. As the name suggests, you can do much more than just reordering GRUB menu entries with it.

You can install it by:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grub-customizer

(See Ask Ubuntu question Are PPA's safe to add to my system and what are some “red flags” to watch out for?.)

There is an How-To Geek article about it, How to Configure the Linux GRUB 2 Boot Menu the Easy Way. Take a look at it if you're interested. Also, there is a solved thread on the Ubuntu Forums, Change boot order in GRUB 2 that mentions this tool.

Here are some screenshots:

Some troubleshooting:

The Grub Customizer settings may work only from within the latest Linux/Ubuntu installation, the one that installed the Grub.

For example, if somebody has two OS-es installed (Windows and Ubuntu), and then installs a third OS (Manjaro, etc) and then tries to follow the above answer, Grub Customizer changes will not work when made from the second OS (Ubuntu, in the example). The program has to be installed in the thirs OS, as it seems that Grub Customizer can only edit the Grub files created by the installation of the system on which itself is installed.

The files that determine the Grub boot menu come in most cases with the latest system installed on a machine, so Grub Customizer has to be installed and used from that Linux system.

Open up a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T), or press Alt+F2.

Type gksu nautilus and press Enter.

That will open up the file browser Nautilus with permission to change files owned by root.

Navigate to the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg and double-click to open the file in a text editor.

Cut, move and paste the sections in that file that belongs to different operating systems. You must be very careful when doing this, as if you do it wrong then you won't be able to boot anymore. Windows boot can always be repaired with the tools from a windows installation disc (FIXMBR), that overwrites GRUB-MBR with a typical Windows-MBR.

I have tested it from Ubuntu 9.04 to 12.04 and it has worked fine every time.

But I have only tried to move the Windows boot section to the top of the list to make it become the default.

If my memory is correct, each boot menu section in the file starts with a begin ... and ends with an ...end. And spans multiple text rows.

The text in that file has become a bit more complicated and it doesn't look the same in the last Ubuntu version as in previous versions. So use your brain to save you from doing a mistake.


Add persistance on bootable flashdrive from the bootable flashdrive I am currently booted from Ubuntu on a flash drive.
However, it doesn't have persistence. Is there a way to give it persistence while booted on it without reinstalling it?
I don't have admin on the machine I am booting from, so I can't actually reinstall a version with persistence.

I'm using vanilla Ubuntu downloaded from the website yesterday. I installed it with rufus.

Yes it is trivial to add.

Add a casper-rw . https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence#Creating_the_.22casper-rw.22_File_System

This can be on your hard drive or usb. If needed resize your usb partition and add  a second with the file.

To use it is a boot option. Hit F6 and add it in

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence#Booting_the_Live_CD_in_Persistent_Mode


Right button on touchpad not recognized I have an Asus G750. The touchpad (Elantech) works fine on Windows 8. However, after installing ubuntu the right mouse button is not recognized. The 'synaptiks touchpad management' software shows a cross sign under Touchpad Configuration->Hardware Information->Right Button. Similarly, from command line

shiva@shiva-G750JX:~$ xinput --list-props "ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad" | grep Capabilities
    Synaptics Capabilities (302):   1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1

Which also, I believe, means 'right button not working'. Looking up all the help on this forum, I tried setting the "Soft Button Areas" parameter, but that did not change anything.

Can someone please help?

My answer comes from this blog post: http://www.evilcodingmonkey.com/2014/01/23/ubuntu-activate-multi-touch-on-elantech/

First. download this archive (from Ubuntu's bug reporting page): https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1166442/+attachment/3941591/+files/psmouse-elantech-x551c.tar.gz

Open a terminal, and follow these steps (after step 4, you will have no mouse at all):

cd ~/Downloads
sudo dkms ldtarball psmouse-elantech-x551c.tar.gz
sudo dkms install -m psmouse -v elantech-x551c</p>
sudo rmmod psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse

Several users confirm their Elantech touchpad now has right-click and scrolling working. I hope it helps!

I can't help you, but this link describes the problem and solution. It works, I've had to do it for every flavor of Linux I've tried on this machine. "This machine" being my own Asus G750, of course. :)

https://superuser.com/questions/619582/right-elantech-touchpad-button-not-working-in-linux


Where is the update-manager? I can't seem to upgrade to the latest version ubuntu. It asked me once, but I was doing something else at the time. Now that I ant to do it I can't find it. I can find software updater, but that just seems to update programs that are on the computer.

The update manager has the upgrade button you are looking for.

start the update manager with typing update-manager in a terminal. The upgrade button will be shown there.

Or you can search for it in dash by typing update manager.

Click Alt + F2 and type update-manager at the prompt or do the same in Terminal.

If this does not show the update open a Terminal window and type in

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

The sudo apt-get upgrade command updates any installed software requiring an update before you proceed

sudo do-release-upgrade

This searches for and upgrades your system

How to safely upgrade from an older Ubuntu version to a newer one? Is the best and safest way.

Edited with corrections suggested below


When downloading a windows steam game over Ubuntu Wine, I get the error "content server unreachable" I recently botched a dual-boot install job of windows and ubuntu, and just went full Ubuntu.

I'm trying to get my steam games to run via wine. I downloaded the latest version of Wine, and then I downloaded the latest version of the windows steam installer and ran

sudo wine SteamSetup.exe

It successfully installed steam and I can get inside, but it seems that all network features are unavilable. I can see that my friends are online, but I can't access the store. When I download my games, I get the error

An error occurred while installing [Game Name] (content servers are unreachable)

None of the tutorials I've followed have mentioned anything about this issue, and it happens whether I install Steam through the terminal, with winetricks, or with PlayOnLinux.

What's going on, here?

EDIT:

Here's the Steam developer console:

Failed to init SteamVR because it isn't installed
Couldn't create IPolicyConfigVista: 0x80040154
ExecCommandLine: ""C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe" -no-cef-sandbox -lognetapi -console"
IPC server is in my process - could/should be using an in process pipe
System startup time: 14.31 seconds
Crypto API failed certificate check, error flags 0x00000008 for '/C=US/ST=Massachusetts/L=Cambridge/O=Akamai Technologies, Inc./CN=a248.e.akamai.net'
Crypto API failed certificate check, error flags 0x00000008 for '/C=US/ST=Massachusetts/L=Cambridge/O=Akamai Technologies, Inc./CN=a248.e.akamai.net'
Crypto API failed certificate check, error flags 0x00000008 for '/C=US/ST=Massachusetts/L=Cambridge/O=Akamai Technologies, Inc./CN=a248.e.akamai.net'
Crypto API failed certificate check, error flags 0x00000008 for '/C=US/ST=Massachusetts/L=Cambridge/O=Akamai Technologies, Inc./CN=a248.e.akamai.net'
Crypto API failed certificate check, error flags 0x00000008 for '/C=US/ST=Massachusetts/L=Cambridge/O=Akamai Technologies,
Inc./CN=a248.e.akamai.net'
CAPIJobRequestUserStats - Server response failed 2
"
Crypto API failed certificate check, error flags 0x00000008 for
'/C=US/ST=Massachusetts/L=Cambridge/O=Akamai Technologies,
Inc./CN=a248.e.akamai.net'
GameAction [AppID 8170, ActionID 1] : LaunchApp failed with AppError_18 with ""
GameAction [AppID 8170, ActionID 1] : LaunchApp changed task to Failed with ""
GameAction [AppID 8170, ActionID 2] : InstallApps waiting for user
response to ShowEula "http://store.steampowered.com/eula/8170_eula_1"
GameAction [AppID 8170, ActionID 2] : InstallApps continues with user
response "ShowEula"
GameAction [AppID 8170, ActionID 2] : InstallApps changed task to
CreateNextApp with ""
saving roaming config store to 'sharedconfig.vdf'
roaming config store 2 saved successfully
GameAction [AppID 8170, ActionID 2] : InstallApps failed with
AppError_21 with ""

I received a solution to my problem in the first post of this thread that I made on the wine forums:

https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30767

Go to the link that they provide and edit the config file as specified.

  For the store not working the flag is -no-cef-sandbox

  For the content server error, a bug was filed
  here

  For now there's a workaround given that requires editing a file in the
  Steam/config directory. Comment #4 has the workaround:
  https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45329#c4

  I found out the difference between my two Steam installations - the one that works has a different config in drive_c/Program Files/Steam/config/config.vdf

  After installing Steam in a fresh WINEPREFIX, downloading games won't work. Open the mentioned config, and under:

"InstallConfigStore"
{
  "Software"
  {
    "Valve"
    {
      "Steam"
       {

  add the following entry (for me it's directly under "cip" and "CM"):

"CS" "valve511.steamcontent.com;valve501.steamcontent.com;valve517.steamcontent.com;valve557.steamcontent.com;valve513.steamcontent.com;valve535.steamcontent.com;valve546.steamcontent.com;valve538.steamcontent.com;valve536.steamcontent.com;valve530.steamcontent.com;valve559.steamcontent.com;valve545.steamcontent.com;valve518.steamcontent.com;valve548.steamcontent.com;valve555.steamcontent.com;valve556.steamcontent.com;valve506.steamcontent.com;valve544.steamcontent.com;valve525.steamcontent.com;valve567.steamcontent.com;valve521.steamcontent.com;valve510.steamcontent.com;valve542.steamcontent.com;valve519.steamcontent.com;valve526.steamcontent.com;valve504.steamcontent.com;valve500.steamcontent.com;valve554.steamcontent.com;valve562.steamcontent.com;valve524.steamcontent.com;valve502.steamcontent.com;valve505.steamcontent.com;valve547.steamcontent.com;valve560.steamcontent.com;valve503.steamcontent.com;valve507.steamcontent.com;valve553.steamcontent.com;valve520.steamcontent.com;valve550.steamcontent.com;valve531.steamcontent.com;valve558.steamcontent.com;valve552.steamcontent.com;valve563.steamcontent.com;valve540.steamcontent.com;valve541.steamcontent.com;valve537.steamcontent.com;valve528.steamcontent.com;valve523.steamcontent.com;valve512.steamcontent.com;valve532.steamcontent.com;valve561.steamcontent.com;valve549.steamcontent.com;valve522.steamcontent.com;valve514.steamcontent.com;valve551.steamcontent.com;valve564.steamcontent.com;valve543.steamcontent.com;valve565.steamcontent.com;valve529.steamcontent.com;valve539.steamcontent.com;valve566.steamcontent.com;valve165.steamcontent.com;valve959.steamcontent.com;valve164.steamcontent.com;valve1611.steamcontent.com;valve1601.steamcontent.com;valve1617.steamcontent.com;valve1603.steamcontent.com;valve1602.steamcontent.com;valve1610.steamcontent.com;valve1615.steamcontent.com;valve909.steamcontent.com;valve900.steamcontent.com;valve905.steamcontent.com;valve954.steamcontent.com;valve955.steamcontent.com;valve1612.steamcontent.com;valve1607.steamcontent.com;valve1608.steamcontent.com;valve1618.steamcontent.com;valve1619.steamcontent.com;valve1606.steamcontent.com;valve1605.steamcontent.com;valve1609.steamcontent.com;valve907.steamcontent.com;valve901.steamcontent.com;valve902.steamcontent.com;valve1604.steamcontent.com;valve908.steamcontent.com;valve950.steamcontent.com;valve957.steamcontent.com;valve903.steamcontent.com;valve1614.steamcontent.com;valve904.steamcontent.com;valve952.steamcontent.com;valve1616.steamcontent.com;valve1613.steamcontent.com;valve958.steamcontent.com;valve956.steamcontent.com;valve906.steamcontent.com"

  I don't know if the whitespace matters, here it's four tab characters
  (0x09) "CS" two tabs and the rest, on one line. Without the ">".

I got this error and it turns out that a reference to the content servers was missing in the config file (config.vdf).
The following are the steps needed to resolve this:

Install a native Steam client (the official way) onto your system if you haven’t already (you really only need to do this the get that Steam clients config file).
Open the Steam client's config file (In my case this was located in: /home/<username>/.steam/steam/config/config.vdf) and look for the line starting with CS (this stands for “Content Server”).
Copy the ENTIRE line beginning with CS and make a note of its location in the file.
Open the PlayonLinux application and right-click on the Steam application and select Open the application’s directory.
Go into the config directory and open the config.vdf file.
Paste the CS line that you have just copied into a location similar to that of the config file that it was copied from (for me this was directly under cip and CM).
Save the file then restart your system. Once your system has rebooted you should be able to install your games using the steam client on the  PlayonLinux application.

Found in this blog post.


Can I use banshee from the command line? I love Banshee media player in general, and I already have an important library of music, which I've spent a lot of time organizing (labeling, correcting, etc).

I also use the command line a lot, so I wonder if there is a way I can control banshee from the command line. As in:

Next, Prev, Stop, Play, etc
In anyway query the Banshee database as if using the search box in the GUI

I was akin to program it myself if there isn't, but that would be another question :)

According to man banshee, it is possible to control playback. I'm not sure about searching though.

Here are a few of the controls that you mentioned. Check the man page for many more.

--next
    Play the next track, optionally restarting if the 'restart' value is set

--previous
    Play the previous track, optionally restarting if the 'restart value is set

--stop
    Completely stop playback

--play
    Start playback

I don't think there is a command-line interface to Banshee at this point. And I haven't heard anything to indicate that they would be working on one.


Mate desktop 20.04 hovering panel thumbnail causes excessive CPU usage Observed on Mate 20.04 .iso install, host and VM.
When I hover over the windows on the panel, it is supposed to generate a thumbnail for the window. When that works correctly, there is no problem(seemingly).
When the thumbnail for the window does not generate, the CPU usage goes excessively high, and remains that way until I move the cursor away from the offending window.
The process is wnck-applet that is shown to be spiking.
I resolved this by (on the panel) opening "Window List Preferences" and selecting "Hide thumbnails on hover".
Though I am not a huge fan of the feature, it has been somewhat useful on my work desktop where I have a ton of windows...
Is there any known fixes out there to make the thumbnails consistently show when hovered over?
The Wu

I highly recommend a window manager called Compiz.
Here is how to install it:
If you don't have Synaptic installed then you gotta do it from Terminal:
sudo apt install synaptic
then enter password
Now run Synaptic: Main Menu: System ⯈ Administration ⯈ Synaptic Package Manager.  (then enter password)
In Synaptic search for a package called: compiz. Find the package and install it and any other recommended packages by clicking on the box and select "mark for installation". Then just click Apply at the top to install it.  Do the same for the package called: compizconfig-settings-manager.  Once installed you can close Synaptic.
Now run Mate-Tweak.  Its in Main Menu: System⯈ Preferences⯈ Look and Feel⯈ Mate Tweak.  In Mate Tweak Click on the Windows icon.  In the drop down menu under "Window manager" select Compiz(Advanced GPU accelerated desktop effects)
Now run CompizConfig Settings Manager.  Its in Main Menu: System⯈ Preferences⯈ Look and Feel⯈ CompizConfig Settings Manager.
In the Compiz Settings page look for EXTRAS: "Thumbnail Window Previews" and check the box. Now when you hover over the panel there will be thumbnails. Compiz thumbnails also play video like if a video is playing in VLC its thumbnail will be a small video.
I also highly recommend other effects in Compiz like: "Desktop Cube" and "3D Windows".  I can activate it by pressing the ctrl and super keys on my keyboard and then by clicking and dragging on my screen i can rotate the cube desktop. You can select any key combo you want to activate it because compiz is customizable.
One day all linux distros will have Compiz preinstalled.
Linux Forever


Is a windows xp running on a virtual box with guest additions harmful for ubuntu? Does it may lead to viruses issues? I am new to ubuntu and after some month and a half running it side by side with Windows 7 I decided that it would be my main system, and so I just formatted the machine and installed it as the only OS. However, I still need to run some stuff that don't have options for ubuntu, just like netflix or to manage my Windows Phone system.

As a solution, I am thinking about running Windows XP on a VM, I just installed VirtualBox, but after some searching I saw that the best perfomance would be obtained if I install the Guest Additions. I don't intend to share folders, although I am concerned if installing guest additions would somehow expose my Linux system to Windows viruses. And I will probably use the network through windows xp vm either, but I won't surf on the web, I'll only eventually use netflix.

Well, the question literally is, as said on the title, is windows xp running on a virtual box with guest additions harmful for ubuntu? Does it may lead to viruses issues?

As much as I would love to say that a virtualized sandboxed Windows does no harm to you I can't.

A virtual Windows behaves exactly like a Windows on bare metal, i.e. it is no less vulnerable to malware.

Whenever your run an unprotected copy of Windows it may quickly get infected by a virus coming from a file, a mail, a website, or an infected storage device. One of the main function all malware have is to replicate. Exactly this will happen on your virtual machine too.

The virus will not be able to infect your Ubuntu host, but it may

sit in files you had accessed from a compromised Windows (you will want to access files outside the VM sooner or later).
be able to spread from your infected virtual OS to your network, or to the world wide web.
in case you let your virtual OS  access data files stored on the host machine, it may even be able to spy on you.
rare viruses may infect your router no less from a virtual machine. Just open a browser there to access your router's administration page from a VM if you are skeptical.

So in summary an infected virtual Windows will not be able to infect your Ubuntu installation, but it will still be a risk to you or to others. It is therefore strongly recommended to protect a virtual Windows with appropriate anti-virus software before you give it access to your network, or the internet.

Windows viruses are not compatible with Linux, imagine your virtual machine to be a sandbox. Trust me, you wont have any problem with viruses on your Linux, although you can always install an antivirus on Windows! I promise you will never get a virus from your virtual machine although you don´t install it.

PS: I recommend: Malwarebytes and AVG (install both).


How do I run a 'sudo' command inside a script? To do a patch manually I must type this command

sudo ./playback_delete_data_patch.sh 09_delete_old_data_p.sql

There is a space just before the 09:

sudo ./playback_delete_data_patch.sh [space] 09_delete_old_data_p.sql

How can I run this inside a script?

There are also several other commands but this one is giving trouble.

It is rarely a good idea to have sudo inside scripts. Instead, remove the sudo from the script and run the script itself with sudo:

sudo myscript.sh

That way, all commands within the script will be run with root privileges and you only need to give the password once when launching the script. If you need a particular command within the script to be run without sudo privileges, you can run it as a regular user with  (thanks Lie Ryan):

sudo -u username command

The space is irrelevant, it should not affect anything, there is always a space between a command and its arguments.

You could try to add the user who runs the script to the sudoers file:

#give permissions to the file
sudo chmod 700 /etc/sudoers.d/useradm

sudo visudo /etc/sudoers.d/useradm

#add the following text, changing "user" but your desired user
user ALL=(ALL)NOPASSWD:ALL

#return the right permissions to the file
sudo chmod 440 /etc/sudoers.d/useradm


How can I get System Monitor Indicator to display temperature? System Monitor Indicator comes with options to display CPU load, memory usage, and other system stats, but currently does not include an option to display temperature (of the CPU, HDD, SSD, GPU, etc.).

There seems to be functionality built in for adding additional sensors by applying a command (by clicking "New"). However, I don't know how, and I cannot find any documentation that describes this feature.

My system is set up to report temperature as so:

user@host:~$ sensors
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +27.8°C  (crit = +106.0°C)
temp2:        +29.8°C  (crit = +106.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +79.0°C  (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 0:         +79.0°C  (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 1:         +77.0°C  (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)

pkg-temp-0-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +79.0°C

This question refers to the package indicator-sysmonitor version 0.4.3 from 13.04 raring, although currently I am running it on a 13.10 saucy installation as it has not yet been updated in the ppa:

https://launchpad.net/indicator-sysmonitor

System Monitor Indicator is quite simple / flexible. You can add basically any script as custom sensor. The output it produces will then appear where you put its placeholder. I am using this to extract information from the output of sensors like this:

sensors | grep temp1 | awk '{print $2}' | sed 's/+//'

to exctract the temperature or

sensors | grep fan1 | awk '{print $2}'

to extract the fan speed.

Just click on New, enter a name and a description and the respective lines from above under Command as shown here:

PS: After upgrading from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 the tool seemed to have problems to read the configuration file, resulting in a crash when I tried to add sensors. Removing .indicator-sysmonitor.json from my home directory fixed this.

as of now  System Monitor Indicator can't show cpu temperature. Here is the answer from the author https://answers.launchpad.net/indicator-sysmonitor/+question/238748


how to recover damaged memory card with the help of Ubuntu? I have 16 gb micro memory card but it suddenly damage and unable to read and open. it only display in Disks utility.
also when I insert that memory card into mobile it display message Damage memory card format it. but if I format memory card I loss all my data. How can solve that issue. Here is screenshot of Disks Utility.

If there is a Microsoft file system, FAT32 or NTFS, try to repair the file system in Windows with

chkdsk /f X:

where X: is the 'drive' letter, for example D: or use a graphical tool in Windows. (You already know that you should not format it.)

If there is a linux file system, try to repair the file system in linux. Ubuntu uses the ext4 file system, which can be repaired with

sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sdxn

where x is the drive letter and n is the partition number, so for example /dev/sdb1

If no luck try Testdisk.

If still no luck try PhotoRec, which can recover files without a file system. The drive must be seen as a mass storage device, and Disks sees it as /dev/sdb, which indicates, that this is the case.

You find more details at these links,

www.cgsecurity.org

Repair the partition table and file system of a pendrive

Use testdisk it is a cli based recovery tool, scan your /dev/sdb/ storage, testdisk can recover lost files.

open terminal and apt-get install testdisk
and  use sudo testdisk and click enter on create here you can view all partition choose /dev/sdb/ and start recovery.


Low graphics error unless I boot via recovery mode I recently upgraded to 12.10 (fresh install). I am a facing weird problem:

When I boot, I get a message notifying me of low graphics. For now, I have been switching to console using Alt+F1 and then rebooting.

Upon reboot, I select recovery mode, allow system to boot and then again reboot.

Now I select normal mode and my graphics load smoothly.

Could you please tell me what could be the issue? I have a Dell Inspiron 5230 with Intel 4000 onboard graphics.

Your question appears similar to this one although you mention you have an Intel GPU (it could be unrelated).

Basically, it looks like LightDM (the default greeter/login screen) can sometimes get a bit confused if you've installed other packages or something has gone wrong with its configuration.

Here is a relevant bug report, though possibly for a different version:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/lightdm/+bug/971891

I think the best (least destructive) advice there is the following:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure unity-greeter
sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

Hopefully that should fix it!

You could also make sure that the ubuntu-desktop metapackage is installed.

Some of the advice in that other question seems suspect to me, either because it involves installing random PPAs or it simply doesn't apply to people with Intel graphics.

Try going into system settings, and under the "Additional Drivers" section, click on that. Their might possibly be an available driver for the card. I would use the recommended driver if any. That makes my graphics really smooth. Good luck!


GIMP can't render psd files properly I'm using GIMP on Ubuntu 10.04. I'm trying to open a psd file with layers, but it gets rendered all wrong. Several colors and gradients show up as black in GIMP instead. If I open the psd in IrfanView with Wine, it will render correctly, but I won't have access to layers.

Is there something I can do to have the psd file with layers render properly in GIMP? If not, is there some other program I can try to view the layers of a psd file?

Since you don't seem to be a programmer, you can't really do anything.

GIMP can't render all PSD files properly simply because it doesn't have some feature. E.g. in Photoshop gradients are often applied as layer styles, and GIMP doesn't have them.

There is support for PSD coming to Krita, another image editing application, but I really couldn't say how much it will support.

There are quite a few good alternatives to Photoshop: http://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-photoshop/?exactmatch=true

I've used Pinta before and I think it rendered PSD files pretty well.
Edit: My mistake, Pinta doesn't seem to be able to open PSD files at all.


fsck error on boot: /dev/sda6: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY I dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 7.
I was browsing on FireFox in Ubuntu and all of a sudden I get some error message, so I rebooted.

Now when I try to boot into Ubuntu I get this message:

fsck from util-linux 2.26.2
/dev/sda6 contains a file system with errors, check forced.
/dev/sda6: Inodes that were part of a corrupted orphan linked list found.

/dev/sda6: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
        (i.e., without -a or -p options)
fsck exited with status code 4
The root filesystem on /dev/sda6 requires a manual fsck

Busybox v1.22.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.22.0-15ubuntu1) built in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs) _

How can I fix this?

Try this:

fsck /dev/sda6

(where /dev/sda6 is the partition mentioned)

And enter Yes (y) to for each error. Or press a one time for always-yes.

Then reboot and it should be fine.

Type exit into the prompt, and it should tell you which partition has an error, e.g. /dev/sda6. Type fsck /dev/sdaX -y where X is the partition mentioned in the error. The -y flag answers yes to all the prompts it would otherwise have given you - you don't have to use it but it is recommended. Once it has finished, type reboot into the prompt, and if prompted, select to continue normal startup.


Why can't I get my NIVIDA drivers to work I've tried everything:
messing around in my xorg.conf file,
purging my nvidia driver and reinstalling,
updating my headers
unplugging and plugging everything back in,
(turning on and off again)
enabling drivers manually,
installing and uninstalling ubuntu-desktop and NVIDIA common,
updating,
upgrading,
manual installs via .run,
starting lightdm and startx.

I figured our it was something to do with my video card setting to high of a resolution. After resetting that I at least got to the tty terminal. But nothing I did would bring up the GUI. Nothing. I'm using a Nvidia 560 gtx on ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

If there's a single person who can help me I will give you a hug, put pizza in my hard drive, and E-mail it to you!

UPDATE
Used sgfxi (good idea), now the only problem is that I can't get to my desktop. Startx says it can't find a screen and after looking through the log it says failed to initialize the NVIDIA GPU at PCI:1:0:0. I have a desktop and all of the search results talk about bumblebee, which if I'm not mistaken is for laptops with optimus.
There's a lot of info and I can make ends of it, but I don't know what to look for. Any help (I can't paste from terminal because I have no idea how).

You can use this script  smxi script
It will automatically detect your hardware configuration and install nvidia driver.
Also there are bunch of other stuffs.

I past I had used this script on my debian wheezy.
Here's what I had used How To : Smxi script

Hope this helps n hope I get that ePizza


Why isn't the configuration to make KDE apps look native default? why isn't the configuration to make KDE apps look native present in the default setup ?

Mark has answered this question here: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/568

  " System settings and prefs, however, have long been a cause of friction between Qt and Gtk. Integration with system settings and preferences is critical to the sense of an application “belonging” on the system. It affects the ability to manage that application using the same tools one uses to manage all the other applications, and the sorts of settings-and-preference experience that users can have with the app. This has traditionally been a problem with Qt / KDE applications on Ubuntu, because Gtk apps all use a centrally-manageable preferences store, and KDE apps do things differently."

And is trying to fix it:

  "To address this, Canonical is driving the development of dconf bindings for Qt, so that it is possible to write a Qt app that uses the same settings framework as everything else in Ubuntu. We’ve contracted with Ryan Lortie, who obviously knows dconf very well, and he’ll work with some folks at Canonical who have been using Qt for custom development work for customers. We’re confident the result will be natural for Qt developers, and a complete expression of dconf’s semantics and style."

As far as I know (and understand), this happens because KDE apps are by default designed to be installed in a Kubuntu environment. For this reason, they are of course packaged to use a QT (thus KDE) theme by default, as opposed to the QT-GTK+ theme.

Maybe in the future, the application will be able to detect which environment it is running on at the time and automatically choose a theme to suit.


Ubuntu 18.04 systemd-resolved error NXDOMAIN I have installed Ubuntu 18.04 and the syslog is showing me the following error:

systemd-resolved: Server returned error NXDOMAIN, mitigating potential DNS violation DVE-2018-0001, retrying transaction with reduced feature level UDP.

What does this mean, and how do I resolve these error messages?

The shortest and simplest answer is this:
These 'errors' in your syslog are generated as a result of the workaround identified in DVE-2018-0001, indicating that the system is attempting to mitigate further cases of DVE-2018-0001 violations by retrying the same request without EDNS extensions.  This does not indicate an error you yourself can fix, nor does it mean there's anything to fix in this case.
It simply indicates that the systemd-resolved service is attempting to retry the same query to try and prevent further issues of DVE-2018-0001 which can be caused by captive portals not supporting EDNS0 extensions.
There is no further action needed by you in this case, this is more 'informational' information provided to the syslog by systemd-resolved.
However... if you want to know a little more about what exactly is going on here, then read on further, I provide a summary of this and some example data to show you exactly what's going on behind the scenes of these messages.

The Details (if you care to read them):
The error you are seeing is not actually an error message you have to act upon, and the statement of "Server returned error" is misleading.  Rather, this is a notice that we're following a workaround defined in DNS Violation DVE-2018-0001.
This is an example of the log itself from my computer here:
Feb  5 13:29:17 overlord systemd-resolved[857]: Server returned error NXDOMAIN, mitigating potential DNS violation DVE-2018-0001, retrying transaction with reduced feature level UDP.

Per DVE-2018-0001, it was discovered that, in Ubuntu 17.10 and later:

When trying to connect and authorise with the captive portal at securelogin.arubanetworks.com, at some point it fails to resolve correctly and thus users are failing to pass captive portal authorisation and access internet.

Further, this goes on to explain the problem:

Originally this was reports on Ubuntu bug tracker at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/1727237
This might be a bug in Ubuntu/systemd-resolved and/or securelogin.arubanetworks.com DNS spoofing/captivity and/or both.
From packet capture it appears that DNS query with EDNS0 DO (DNSSEC OK) bit set to zero, is responded to with NXDOMAIN.
Requests without EDNS0, are responded to with the correct portal IP address.

What this means is that there are certain responses going to the captive portals here that do not properly support EDNS0 queries; and that this needs to be adjusted by manufacturers.
The current workaround implemented in systemd-resolved within Ubuntu is what is generating the informational messages you see.  This is in conjunction with the proposed workaround in the DVE (bold text emphasis and plain-text formatting for command names and codes/responses are mine):

In systemd-resolved, when performing lookup of domain names with 'secure' in them, and receiving NXDOMAIN repsonse, retry again without EDNS0.

This therefore is what your messages are stating, but with a more broad coverage.  Namely, when a DNS request is filed and you get an NXDOMAIN response from the DNS lookup, we want to make sure that we aren't hitting this EDNS0 problem; therefore, systemd-resolved is attempting the DNS lookup again but without the EDNS0 extensions - we can see this in my Bind9 nameserver which handles all requests on my machine as well with an example (though this is a prime example of a non-domain being queried, and in turn a prime example of how this mitigation can show itself when the 'mitigation' is not actually going to solve the headache):
05-Feb-2019 13:29:17.976 queries: info: client @0x7f6cd400aee0 127.0.0.1#41213 (favicon.png): query: favicon.png IN A +E(0) (127.0.2.1)
05-Feb-2019 13:29:17.976 queries: info: client @0x7f6cd400aee0 127.0.0.1#41213 (favicon.png): query: favicon.png IN A + (127.0.2.1)

As you can see, instead of +E(0) the request is retried without that extension; this is the 'reduced feature level UDP' request behavior.

Coming a little late to this party. Had this error/issue pop up when I "uncommented" UseDNS no in /etc/ssh/sshd_conf. The comment note that I attached to this change reads,

  disable resolving of host name

With all things being equal, this may some how "influence" this issue. As yet, haven't tested this out - as in reverting back the original settings.

Hope this helps somewhere.


Ubuntu does not recognize USB So guys, I was about to install Ubuntu into my USB. But recently I formatted my USB drive as FAT and clear all the data.

After that the computer doesn't recognize the USB any more. When I open nautilus it doesn't show the drive. I tried sudo fdisk -l :

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0008fcc4

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048   310505471   155251712   83  Linux
/dev/sda2       310507518   312580095     1036289    5  Extended
/dev/sda5       310507520   312580095     1036288   82  Linux swap / Solaris

Also a screenshot from gnome-disks (I plug it in but nothing changed).

Download and use the following program to install the *.iso from here.


New Ubuntu Install on flashdrive not booting properly Due to various reason, I have been in need to install Ubuntu on a thumb drive. I have been trying for the last few days or so to install Ubuntu (Not the  "LIVE CD" ) on a flashdrive. Everytime I try to boot, I get either a) an error from my computer's bios saying that it is not a bootable drive; b) a frozen purple or black screen; c) I get to the GRUB menu and when I try to get to login, it freezes midway; or d) I login and the entire thing freezes for what feels like an eternity only to eventually get up and come back after a minute and find the thing is back at the login screen.

I have reinstalled Ubuntu various ways; I have attempted repairing the installs; I have looked high and low. I don't know what is happening. Can someone please help me! I am very new to Linux, and I am completely lost as to what is going on.
Here are some technical specs of what I use:

64GB flashdrive (USB 2.0)
Dell Optiplex 990

i7 2600
8GB RAM
AMD RADEON HD 6***(No idea what it is after that)

Please help. I'm begging.

Ordinarily, USB drives are formatted with FAT32, but when Windows formats a USB FlashDrive for FAT32, it imposes a 32GB maximum volume size. If you download and install the Rufus app then download the Ubuntu image with it and remake the LiveUSB with Rufus, you can specify ExFAT  (see below) which allows you full use of that 64GB flash drive, following the specs for FAT32, and boot from it as a FAT32 drive with no problem. Once that's done, then install full Ubuntu over the Ubuntu LiveUSB image.

Also, make sure Secure Boot is turned OFF and ?HCI/xHCI is ON in the Dell BIOS/Firmware setup.  Here are explicit instructions for creating a full Ubuntu install to USB.

Note: As a comment on this answer, Akeo, author of the superb Rufus Open Source LiveUSB creator, noted choosing ExFAT in Rufus formats the flash drive as 'Large FAT32' following the original FAT32 specs which do not have the Microsoft-imposed 32 GB limit. See first comment, below.


I can't install Ubuntu. The error is : speech-dispatcher disabled I want to install Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit in a new Dell xps 13.

When I am trying to install appears this message:

 speech-dispatcher disabled

and after that I get a black screen.

This is probably unrelated to speech-dispatcher; it's most likely that that's simply the last message you saw before the GUI loaded and failed to display. However, if what you've described is occurring after you've started the installation process and not during boot, please edit your question to indicate this. And if this answer doesn't fix your problem, please edit your question to describe exactly what steps you are following to install and everything that happens in response.

First, you should MD5 test the .iso image you downloaded. If that doesn't check out, you'll have to redownload it and start over. Assuming that does check out, go ahead and test your installation media for defects. If that reveals a problem, then you'll have to burn the CD or write the USB flash drive over again.

If both of those tests show no errors, try setting the nomodeset boot option.

I had the same problem. I was using 13.x version.
It shows the message terminating all .. etc

I just hit the enter in the machine, that triggered to reboot the VM and the VM started normally.


volume jumps to 100% when inserting or removing headphones I am running Ubuntu 12.04 on a Lenovo Thinkpad T530.  When I insert my headphones, the volume jumps to 100%, even if it was set lower before I inserted them (and also was lower the last time I used the headphones).  If I then lower the volume and remove the headphones, the volume jumps to 100% again.

The only exception is that if the volume is muted, it stays muted when I insert or remove the headphones.

Any suggestions for what might be causing this?

lspci shows this audio device:
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Panther Point High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)

Try controlling the volume using alsamixer.


Why are my games so slow through WINE? Discovering I needed Wine to run anything Windows-based. I discovered I'd need DirectX to do anything significant, which in turn needed .NET framework. Using this (http://www.dedoimedo.com/games/wine-directx.html) tutorial for DirectX and downloading Wine 3.5 off of WineTricks, I thought I had everything sorted. Unfortunately, I don't. What worked fine on Windows either doesn't work or runs like it was stuck in molasses. Now, I know there are a lot of programs that have compatibility issues with Wine but what I don't understand is the slow-running programs part. Here are my system specs:

Toshiba Satellite L455D-S5976
CPU: AMD Sempron SI-42 Single-core 2.1 GHz
RAM: 3GB (2.7 technically)
HDD: 500GB
GPU:  ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3100

Here's a partial list of the games I've been trying:

Supreme Commander
Command and Conquer: Generals (Zero-Hour)
Assassin's Creed
World in Conflict
Star Ruler (Blind Mind Studios)
Trackmania (Nadeo)
Battlefield 2
X3:Terran Conflict (Egosoft)
Rubber Ninjas
Sim City 4

I would think that it was just my system being slow—I don't have the system requirements to really run AC—but here's the weird part. In the opening intro, it'll run at around 10FPS for about 3 seconds, and then 60 or so, faster than it ever had on my previous laptop which was actually better than this current one. And, for example, games like Rubber Ninjas, C&C, SupCom, and WiC all ran smoothly on my first laptop which was similarly specced to this one.

Oh! And another quick question—when I first installed WINE, unconfigured, I installed Derek Smart's Universal Combat and it worked fine. Now after some other games and some reconfiguring, it won't work at all, even if I reset to default settings.

So, am I doing something wrong? Does Wine need to be configured differently? I'm completely lost, here, and any help would be -greatly- appreciated, thank you. I do sincerely apologize for the wall of text, here, but I didn't want to leave any detail out, as that tends to make things harder for all parties involved.

P.S: I recently discovered ClockGen, found here (http://www.techspot.com/community/topics/overclocking-a-toshiba-satellite-laptop.32667/): and was wondering, is overclocking a viable solution? I don't remember what command I used to find my CPU speed—but it said my current speed was 2100MHz (aka 2.1 gigs), but the kicker was that my “max” speed was 4,000 MHz. Now, I would never DREAM of overclocking a laptop, or even a desktop, to that ridiculous speed, but even if I could get 2.4 or 5 out of it...and I would take full responsibility for the wrath I incur from the laptop gods. I would never run this thing unplugged—I don't anyway already so a battery's pretty much moot for me...and I have a high-speed fan running under any laptop at all times—scorched my pants with my first laptop and have been wary ever since.

You may not want to hear this but if you enjoy a lot of Windows-only software and need it to perform as well as it would on Windows then dual-booting - having an actual bare-metal Windows installation - is the best way to achieve this.

Any kind of emulation layer, and Wine is an emulation layer despite what people say the name stands for these days, has the potential to degrade performance.

In particular, DirectX is a big and complicated beast and providing an entire emulating API for it adds a huge amount of weight, so any 3D game is going to suffer greatly under Wine.  Subroutines that are hardware-accelerated in Windows may be emulated in software under Wine, or they may be hardware-accelerated but in a different, and less efficient way.  The bottom line is a lot of the time you will get severely degraded performance.

Wine is a great exercise in providing API compatibility for Windows applications, and should be admired for the success it has had in doing so, but one should never expect anything to perform as it would in Windows itself.

Note: some decent games are natively available for Linux, through Steam or otherwise, and should run well enough on Linux.  What won't run as well are games released exclusively for Windows, particularly if they use DirectX which will be the heavier, slower emulation on Wine.

Wine isn't made for games. You can try playing games with wine but it will be very slow or it will have problems.

You can try PlayOnLinux. See if that helps.

Download PlayOnLinux in the software center.


How to get rid of Transmission zombie process? Problem:
I was downloading a file over Transmission when I noticed that the Transmission window was grayed out and not responding. On clicking it, Ubuntu (10.04) asked to force-close which I did. What remains is a zombie process that uses 100% of 1 CPU, and that's pretty much stopping my little machine dead in its tracks. top and System Monitor look very much the same as the screenshots in this related question.

Steps taken:

I tried right-clicking the zombie in System Monitor and select "Kill" but nothing happened.
Rebooting seems to work, except that it happens again when I restart Transmission.
I see in System Monitor that it has a PID, 5 digits. I tried sudo kill {the PID} but nothing happened. (I don't know my way around Linux so I didn't try kill with any parameters.)
Now, I'm simply not starting Transmission again until I know how to deal with this.
I'm guessing that if I remove all Transmission downloads and reboot, then it would work again, perhaps until I try download some problematic file again?

Question:
It's clear that I can't kill this zombie without rebooting. (Or can I?) How can I avoid this zombie? What is causing Transmission to break down?

Update 1: I now tried sudo kill -9 {the PID} and it didn't seem to do anything. A minute later the zombie was gone, and the grey Transmission window too. I started Transmission again, and it seems to run now. Very odd?
Update 2: I just waited a looong time, and it seems to have cleared itself up. Wondering if perhaps I was just being impatient, but I thought that an Intel i5 with 2GB RAM ought to be able to handle simple browsing plus Transmission. Should I just delete this question? It seems to have imploded.
Update 3: This seems to be unrelated to number of downloads (I had only one active), and to rate limits (it happened in both cases). But it's difficult to give useful updates, as it seems to be working fine now. I'll reboot and start Transmission again, then see if it misbehaves again.

sudo kill -9 {the PID}

That should do it. But use with care - could be leave the system in a messed up state as with that the process has no way to handle dying in any manner that would be graceful.

The command to kill a process that does not respond to a basic kill command is to force kill it with

$ killall process_name -KILL

This will terminate any zombies or any processes not responding to standard kill command.


How to set a proxy in kde? I'm using kde and tor. I'm could not set tor ip into the network manager.

Network manager has not any option for proxy.

In the KDE K menu Search enter "Proxy".

Or K-menu, Application, Settings, System Settings, Network Settings, Proxy

You can also get to the KDE global settings using by starting the System Settings program from a terminal, the command is "systemsettings", then go to Network Settings and then Proxy.

Enter your Proxy configuration there.  Many applications will automatically and dynamically use these settings.

Here are the steps to set proxy

Search Network in dash ( you can also find the icon of Network in / -> usr -> share -> applications just double click it to open )
Then chose Network Proxy on the Window.
Select Manual form the list. Set your proxy and
Apply System Wide
Thats it.

Hope this would be your solution.


Unity "File" button opening a separate window when automounting USB I installed Ubuntu 14.04 and whenever I plug an USB drive it automounts it normally and opens a Nautilus window. However, when I change to another window and then try to return to my files by clicking the Nautilus button on the Unity panel it opens a new window  pointing to my home directory. Only when I Alt+Tab to the previously opened window can I access the USB files.

Is there some sort of configuration associated with this?

Thanks in advance.

Unity added more functionality to hover scroll in many places. like: window switcher, desktop switcher, launcher icon...

Just Scroll over icon (without click)

This problem happens when using automount, even if you automat a parition on your disk. I am going to wait for the next release of nautilus and hope it goes away. An alternative is to use nemo file manager. webupd8.org has the files to update you system and you can set it as the default file manager. Problem then goes away.


Why does "tasksel" give an "aptitude failed" error? The problem started in the following way. I was using tasksel from the terminal menu that it shows when I simply do sudo tasksel. I select Lamp Server from the list and started to install all packages related to it. The problem is that by mistake my friend clicked on the termina close button and then on accept, closing the terminal and the activity tasksel was doing. I tried to install the lamp server again and found the following problem:

sudo tasksel install lamp-server
tasksel: aptitude failed (100)

I should mention that I already have aptitude installed. So the error is not that I am missing aptitude. It worked before closing the terminal. How can I solve this?

This is a long outstanding bug.

Do

sudo apt-get update

then

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

Oh and if this ever happens when you (re)install MySQL itself make sure to remove /var/lib/mysql.

edit: Found it on Launchpad from a report in 2007.

Nowadays you can also do

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

The ^ is the equivalent of task select.

You can also get this error if you have some of what tasksel will install already installed.
I had to run

sudo apt-get remove apache2 apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils apache2.2-common libapache2-mod-php5 libapr1 libaprutil1 libdbd-mysql-perl libdbi-perl libnet-daemon-  perl libplrpc-perl libpq5 mysql-client-5.5 mysql-common mysql-server mysql-server-5.5 php5-common php5-mysql

before it would work


Getting back Ubuntu's default boot splash I am a Gnome user. Just out of curiosity, I installed the package kubuntu-desktop to check out the latest KDE. The package has hijacked and replaced the nice ubuntu boot splash with the blue KDE one. How can I get the original boot splash back ? Which package should I re-install ?

If you want to quickly change it back, sudo update-alternatives --config default.plymouth will give you a list of screens you can choose from.

Turning ON/OFF the splash screen on boot is easily changeable via GRUB.

sudo vim /etc/default/grub

You'll see GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Remove splash from this line
Save with :wq
sudo update-grub
sudo reboot now

Splash screen will no longer appear.


JSLint/JS Formatter for Kate I recently switched from Win7 and Notepad++ to Ubuntu and Kate. Everything seems ok, except that I am missing JS Lint and JS Format plugin of Notepad++ on my Kate. The docs are not that much helpful.

Can someone point me to the right direction if they are available.

Thanks...

The Python package Kate Plugins contains a JSlint. The link given also has installation instructions.

Personally, I prefer the cross-platform Sublime Text 2 editor.


Still no wireless after b43 with Dell Inspiron 1525 (Ubuntu 12.04) So I followed the instructions here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1974006 about how to solve this issue. It worked for a bit and then stopped. After doing a modprobe I could at least see my network and click on it but it would not connect (I can always see it if I look under the listed wireless networks under VPN Connections, however).
I'm thinking, from what I read at least, the issue might be that my wireless switch was on during those first steps. Do I now have to undo the b43 install and do it again? Or is there something else I could try?
 I just made the switch to Linux yesterday, so I am hesitant at this point to mess with anything on my own. I should note now that it was installed by someone who knows what they are doing, so we are all good on that front.

I try that solution and it's working.

You need to download the B43.zip install, unzip it into a folder named b43, move the folder in /lib/firmware and do a mobprobe

sudo mobprobe b43

Checkout the link to UbuntuForums for further reference.


How do I get the Xorg folder so I edit my mouse? Okay so I'm new to Xubuntu and I'm trying to get rid of the mouse acceleration like windows has it but I've been told that I need to edit files in xorg first. But the folder is not there and I can't right-click and make it because of permissions. I've tried doing

sudo -X configure

but i get:

Fatal server error:
Server is already active for display 0
If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock
and start again.

Is there anyway to get the folder back?

Just simply kill Xorg server for this session? :)

sudo xkill -a

to start Xorg server after configuring Your mouse acceleration:

sudo xinit.


How do I run Windows 8 via virtualization? I would like to run Windows 8 within a virtual machine under Ubuntu.
My quick attempt with VMware failed.
Has anyone reached to run Windows 8 on Ubuntu?

ps: Microsoft just released a public preview of Windows 8 -- see http://dev.windows.com

Will work with Virtualbox. You have to enable hardware virtualization in the settings, VT-x and Nested Paging.

Try qemu with 512 MB ram.. by the way before going further check MD5 sum matches the checksum provided by Microsoft. There is a probability that the iso you downloaded is corrupt.


Sub-process returned an error code (Solved) So suddenly any apt-get command is not working for me anymore. for example when I type in sudo apt-get upgrade it outputs

    After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Setting up snapd (2.32.3.2~14.04) ...
Failed to enable unit: Unit file snapd.autoimport.service does not exist.
dpkg: error processing package snapd (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 snapd
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

this same problem occurs to me when I type in apt-get autoremove sudo apt-get install -f and most of the other apt-get commands. What can I actually do, can't find anything that helped me on the internet

So after i tried sudo apt install --reinstall snapd this is what it output

    Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reinstallation of snapd is not possible, it cannot be downloaded.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Setting up snapd (2.32.3.2~14.04) ...
Failed to enable unit: Unit file snapd.autoimport.service does not exist.
dpkg: error processing package snapd (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 snapd
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

any other solutions?

Add exit 0 to /var/lib/dpkg/info/snapd.prerm after #!/bin/sh. Then do:

dpkg --purge --force-all snapd
sudo apt-get update

It seems like, you used older repository to install snapd or you upgraded your Ubuntu in not clean way.
So, don't forget to check your sources.list for invalid repositories.


How can I fix no HDMI sound output, despite HDMI sound option being available in sound settings? So I'm new here, but after trying my best to sort it out myself, I have to ask what I'm missing.

I have Ubuntu 12.04, on a Thinkpad SL400 with nVidia GeForce 9300m GS. I've upgraded the nVidia driver to the "recommended" version in the Additional Drivers section.

Video output to my Toshiba HD TV via HDMI works fine, but not audio. The audio system settings show 4 options:

HDMI/DisplayPort
Digital Output (S/PDIF)
Headphones
Speakers

The speakers on the laptop produce sound, but the HDMI speakers do not.

I appreciate any help on solving this.

Roll back the Nvidia driver, problem solved. THere is a bug in the new driver, but version 7.15.11.7597 works.