Linux

Help!

Running lubuntu and installed various updates. On restart, instead of just restarting its going into terminal (I guess).

After taking ages to count(?) the files it brings up a login request.

I enter username + password

Then this comes up.

Any ideas?

Helpfully it's impossible for me to photograph my screen!

Right now I'm most concerned about getting my files as I haven't backed up a load of stuff for a month.

Cheers.

Ps I'm an absolute novice who just uses Linux as a free way to breath e life into my laptop.

1 Attachment

Got the screenshot now.

Cheers.

That's honestly the best I could do, of 10 photos it's the only one that focused.

I'm not sure what's going on there, but I found this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/317604/thinkpad-t430-boots-to-read-only-after-ubuntu-16-04-upgrade

As your screenshot suggests, it looks like your hard drive has been mounted read-only and a startup script is crashing out because it can't write a file to disk. Have you changed /etc/fstab recently? Maybe run a file system check on your hard drive to look for errors, using fsck.

Thanks. That's really helpful and gives me somewhere to start.

Fingers crossed.

Have you changed /etc/fstab recently?

Other than downloading and installing the updates I haven't done anything to my knowledge.

It makes me realise I really need to work out how to have some sort of regular timed backup to a cloud system or something.

check on your hard drive to look for errors, using fsck.

It came back with;

Fsck.ext4: Permission denied while trying to open /dev/sda5
You must have r/w access to the filesystem or be root

Going through the suggestion from the link you posted.

Solved... I think.

Followed the instructions from the link you posted and after that didn't work / didn't mean anything to me I chose and
option that referenced Fsck and then went from there and managed to get it to repair itself.

I wish I had more understanding about what I was actually doing and why though....feels a bit like my dad not grasping left/right click on the mouse ;(

Sometimes during boot, a disk check will be performed. It often happens after an incomplete shutdown, or sometimes it's just scheduled. My guess is that an fsck check was scheduled or triggered for whatever reason, and it was finding an error that it didn't want to automatically repair and so it was preventing a complete boot.

I could be talking out of my arse though. This isn't an area I know a lot about.

All the stuff about release-upgrade-motd suggests the release specifically wanted fsck to run after reboot.

The

... taking ages to count(?) the files ...

was presumably the first fsck, and it decided it needed manual intervention.

Anyone played around with 18.04 yet? Tempted to install it on an old lenovo an in-law has..

I just put it on my laptop. I had a few issues getting it to boot due to graphics card issues, but it seems to be running smoothly now.

I was on 16.04 before, and tbh, the differences (for me) are barely noticeable. I can still run chrome, sublime and a terminal or two.

One thing I noticed was docker-ce isn't available for Bionic via their official PPA. Apparently it'll be available very soon, but I guess this will pop up a few more times until Bionic has been around a bit longer.

Snaps are now available through the package manager, which adds a bit of confusion. You'll now find duplicates when you search for things like Inkscape, Gimp or Chromium, with no indication of which would be the better one to install. As far as I can tell, the Snaps will be more up to date, but (in the case of Gimp) they weigh in at ~200MB instead of ~4MB.

They push something called Canonical Livepatch which you have to log in to use - which seems very odd. And they also push automatic reporting of system metrics.

May be a stupid question, but why does my laptop want to install an update to chromium when I can't find a chromium browser anywhere on it?

this is what it wants to install: chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra versions

Presume it's actually trying to update the codecs package which is already installed.

Assuming Ubuntu or similar you can use Synaptic or apt to find out what depends on it.

Possibly Opera or other browser? Or something like a YouTube downloader?

Cheers. That gives me a place to start and some search terms.

Yeah I am not up to advising a

neat command line

myself

I have run the command Get-SmbConnection in Powershell and I see that one of the Linux fileshares presented is showing dialect 1.5

If I change the smb.conf for that server, adding protocol = SMB2 - will that 'break' the existing file share using SMB1?

cheers

Longshot but does anyone know of a template like this for Libreoffice Calc?

Previously found a really useful one for MS xls, but hoping not to have to recreate it in calc.

Cheers.

EDIT ignore me the MS one seems to work so far: https://templates.office.com/en-au/Project-timeline-with-milestones-TM00000009

Although the dates don't seem to be showing properly.

Welcome to Emergency Mode

Bollocks.

A few hours of trying random stuff, and eventually commenting cryptswap1 and vg-swap out of fstab seemed to have work.

I have no idea why.

It all started when a slave HDD looked like it was failing. Although it's not.

*shrug*

Is there a way to make resizing window panes(?) easier from the vertical edges?

If I'm resizing from the corners the corner arrow is big enough to make it easy. But if I'm trying to bring the sides in/out I have to have the cursor exactly on the edge, which makes it quite difficult.

Is this a thing? or just me?

Cheers.

It depends on your window / desktop / decoration managers.

Cheers. That's given me some terms to search.

FWIW I'm running the default version of Ubuntu 17.10 (Lubuntu). I try and keep everything light as it's an old average laptop.

You can usually use alt+right-drag to resize windows (and alt+left-drag to move them) without having to nail the tiny borders.

As TW says it depends on the window manager, but it seems pretty common.
If not there's often a resize option in the window manager's context menu - it'll either have a button on the title bar, or right-click the title bar or the window's button in your task switcher.

A decoration manager like emerald will also allow you to resize the border thickness quite easily

Cheers all.

I've been getting into the habit of using full-disk encryption for all new installs, but now I realise that presents a bit of a problem for doing remote restarts.

I did a quick google and only found a pretty hacky solution. Is this a case of full-disk encryption and remote restarts: choose one.