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17. June 2016

Multimedia Keys “stuck” after Ubuntu 16.04 upgrade

Filed under: Linux — Tags: , , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 21:19

After upgrading Ubuntu Gnome to 16.04, the multimedia keys / extra keys (like play/pause, volume up/down, mute, calculator, forward, backward, etc.) of my old Cherry G86-21050 DEAAAA keyboard showed a strange behavior: Whenever one of the buttons was pressed, its effect was repeated over and over, just as if the button was stuck. So pressing pause would play and pause the song over and over, pressing calculator would open hundreds of calculator windows. Pressing another special keys stopped the previous effect from repeating, but repeated the effect of the last special key over and over. The normal keys (letter, numbers etc.) were not affected.

As the effect appeared after the upgrade for all special keys, I was sure it was a software problem and not a hardware problem.

Digging around with evtest (no, it is not a good idea to run evtest –grab on your keyboard in a tty :D), I found out that the key events are not repeated multiple times, but the keys are not released.

Annoyed, I tried another keyboard (Logitech Elite Keyboard) for comparison. The special keys of that one worked well.

Finally, I accidentally plugged the “faulty” Cherry Keyboard in the USB port that I had the working Logitech in between and voila: The Cherry’s special keys worked again.

So lesson learned: Have you tried plugging it out and in again? Is the first question you should ask (yourself) whenever some USB device behaves strangely.

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19. May 2016

Ubuntu Gnome: Upgrading to 16.04 Xenial Xerus fails: ubuntu-gnome-desktop (gdm, gnome-session, adwaita-icon-theme and adwaita-icon-theme-full)

Filed under: Linux — Tags: , , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 13:26

Today I upgraded my Ubuntu Gnome 15.10 to 16.04 Xenial Xerus. I was surprised to find in the details that it removes gdm. I started the update and it went normal until it said ubuntu-gnome-desktop was broken due to unresolved dependencies. The GUI upgrade process that I had used closed and I was left with a system upgraded by half. But it was still running, so I started a terminal and started aptitude. It suggested to install various packages to resolve dependencies, especially gdm3, gnome-shell, gnome-shell-extensions and gnome-session. It also proposed to remove unused packages, which were not removed as the upgrade process had stopped half way. I followed aptitudes suggestions, but it left two packages not upgraded: adwaita-icon-theme and gnome-session.

And this took me quite a while to solve. There are two packages: adwaita-icon-theme and adwaita-icon-theme-full. The first one contains a subset of icons, whereas the second one contains all icons. The ubuntu-gnome-desktop requires the adwaita-icon-theme-full package, which in turn requires the adwaita-icon-theme package. The adwaita-icon-theme had an upgrade from version 3.18.0-2ubuntu3 to 3.18.0-2ubuntu3.1. The adwaita-icon-theme-full package requires that it is exactly the same version as adwaita-icon-theme, but the only version that apt found was 3.18.0-2ubuntu3.

Then I found out that adwaita-icon-theme-full is in the universe repository, whereas adwaita-icon-theme is in main. In my sources.list, I had the following:

deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial-proposed main restricted
deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial-proposed main restricted

Therefore, the new version of adwaita-icon-theme was found in the main repository. But universe (and multiverse) repositories were missing  the proposed level, and this was the reason why the new version of adwaita-icon-theme-full was not found by apt. So the solution was simple: Just changing the above lines in sources.list like this, adding universe and multiverse repositories:

deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial-proposed main restricted universe multiverse

Then it updated the remaining packages normally using:

aptitude update
aptitude safe-upgrade

So lesson learned is:
If you add the proposed level in your sources.list, make sure you add it for all repositories you use, e.g. including universe and multiverse, not only main.

Hope this helps somebody who runs into the same issue.

14. July 2015

Ubuntu Gnome 15.04: Hide Hidden files in Nautilus

Filed under: Linux — Tags: , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 15:14

To hide hidden files and folders in Nautilus in Ubuntu Gnome 15.05, type this in a terminal:

gsettings set org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser show-hidden false

If you want to see hidden files from time to time, press CTRL + H in a nautilus window.

Ubuntu Gnome: Sort folders first in Nautilus

Filed under: Linux — Tags: , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 14:56

If you prefer to have the folders at the beginning in Nautilus, just type this command in a terminal:

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences sort-directories-first true

Works in Ubuntu Gnome 15.04

Ubuntu Gnome: Find file starting with the letter you type in Nautilus

Filed under: Linux — Tags: , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 14:49

New nautilus versions start searching for what you start typing inside a folder. If you instead prefer to jump to the files starting with what you type, just like Windows Explorer behaves, type this in a terminal:

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences enable-interactive-search true

Works on Ubuntu Gnome 15.04

5. June 2015

Ubuntu gnome: minimize buttons missing after upgrade to vivid

Filed under: Linux — Tags: , , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 15:22

After upgrading an Ubuntu Gnome installation from 14.10 utopic to 15.04 vivid, the minimize and maximize buttons at the windows were missing.

This is how I got them back:

Run

dconf-editor

Then go to

org → gnome → desktop → wm → preferences

And change the value for “button-layout” from

appmenu:close

to:

appmenu:minimize,maximize,close

And close the window. That’s it 🙂

29. October 2014

RabbitVCS on Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 Trusty Tahr

Filed under: Linux — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 11:38

I installed RabbtVCS on Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 Trusty Tahr from the Ubuntu repositories (rabbitvcs-nautilus) and it did not integrate into Nautilus. It also seemed to cause other strange effects (mouse wheel not working any more, …?).

Installing the latest version from the RabbitVCS PPA fixed all this:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rabbitvcs/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rabbitvcs-nautilus3

Hope this saves somebody half an hour figuring out how to solve this 😉