Why does the .deb package installer have to ask me for my password every time? Just remember it for several minutes, like every other program does.
Ubuntu: “Your laptop battery is low. I’m going to shut down in 3 minutes.”
Me: “3 minutes?? Isn’t that a bit… last minute?”
*plugs in computer within 10 seconds*
Ubuntu (plugged in, charging the battery, less than 30 seconds after the last warning): “Battery is critically low, shutting down.”
Me: “FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU”
I can’t even play a .wav file in Audacity anymore without it skipping constantly, on a 2 GHz machine with 2 GiB of memory. Works fine in Windows. I find it very hard to believe that anyone has ever used Ubuntu to produce music.
When you switch the “fallback” from one audio output device to another, and then push the hardware volume buttons, it adjusts the new default device’s volume, as it should.
Instead of adjusting relative to the new device’s current volume, though, it starts adjusting at the old device’s previous volume, resulting in a sudden, deafening increase if the previous device was at full volume.
Thanks, guys.
Apparently PulseAudio mixer cannot control the entire volume range of my USB audio interface. alsamixer can, but PulseAudio cannot.
Of course, after increasing the volume with alsamixer and then closing the entire Terminal, my CPU usage starts maxing out. The culprit? alsamixer.
My mouse pointer is freezing every few seconds.
I closed all apps, the CPU is not active, and I didn’t do anything that I know of to trigger this, but it’s still happening. Great.
~> man grub
No manual entry for grub
Oh, FFS, FSF.
If you set a USB audio device as the default in OS X, unplug it, and replug it, it will become the default again.
If you set a USB audio device as the default (the “fallback”) in Ubuntu, unplug it, and replug it, your settings have been forgotten.
So Karmic comes with this new Disk Utility called Palimpsest. It lets you manage disks and partitions, warns you if a disk is failing (finally!), etc.
So I tried using it to delete a partition on a USB flash drive and recreate it. Just a FAT32 partition; shouldn’t be too difficult.
After it’s done creating and formatting the partition, it displays it as “4.1 GB Unrecognized”. I go into GParted and the partition is “Unknown”. Smooth.
Video chat is supposed to be available in both Pidgin and Empathy, but it doesn’t work in either of them.
In Windows, I can upgrade to Firefox 3.5 (the single piece of software that I use more frequently than any other) or Thunderbird 3.0 the day they are published.
In Ubuntu, I get to wait 4 or 5 months for it to trickle down with the next release.
(Of course, you should never upgrade on the day of an Ubuntu release. How naïve! You have to wait at least a few more months until they iron some of the bugs out. (But not all of the bugs. Those will have to wait until the next release…))
Both of my Ubuntu computers have locked up with unresponsive black screens in the past few days. Thanks to the latest 2.6.31-20 kernel, or just more of the same old random failures?
I like how old kernels are never removed when you update them, leaving lots of options that nobody uses in the GRUB menu and hundreds of MB of hard disk wasted. It should offer to remove older kernels after you’ve been using the new one successfully for a few weeks/months.
Sometimes I’ll move the mouse pointer with the touchpad, and when I stop moving, the mouse keeps going in the same direction, resulting in my clicking the wrong thing.
So today, I turn on my computer. It shows the GRUB boot menu, as usual. I let it automatically choose the first of several cryptic options, as usual. It shows an Ubuntu logo, as usual. After a minute or two, the Ubuntu logo disappears and, instead of the Gnome Desktop Manager, a console login prompt appears. No errors, no indication that anything is even wrong.
I turn off the machine and try again, with the same result. I turn off the machine and try again with a different kernel, with the same result. To my knowledge, I have not changed anything that would cause this.
So I’m in Windows XP. What do you know? It boots with absolutely no problems, as it always has. Of course, all the stuff I’ve been working on exists only on my Linux EXT3 partition, which Windows can’t open. (No, Ext2IFS does not work, and I don’t trust it, anyway.)
“But Mi¢ro$oft Windoze is so buggy and unreliable! OMG BSOD LOL! You should switch to Linux, it’s sooo much more stable and reliable than that Bill Gate$ shit. Did I mention Linux is freeeeeeeeeeeee?”
Fuck you. Seriously.
And why the hell did they change all the program names in Karmic? Instead of “Text Editor”, it’s “gedit”. Instead of “Gnome Partition Manager”, it’s “GParted”.
Is this part of some campaign to make things more difficult to find?
Clicking on a link to a media file in Firefox is infuriating. Totem (which sucks) is the default media player plugin. It plays the file using the entire Firefox viewing area.
And no, MPlayer is not any better.
Pidgin often crashes for no apparent reason.
Gnome Do has has the ability to run “Home Folder”, which opens your home folder. Except not really. You run it and nothing ever happens.
This bug was reported three releases ago, can be solved by adding a space and a dot to a text file, yet it still hasn’t been fixed. This is the norm in the wonderful world of Open Source.
So if Pd is running, Nautilus and Totem refuse to play any sound, but if Totem is playing sound, Pd refuses to play sound. Also, running Pd apparently causes Firefox to lock up.
Neither produces any error messages or explanation, of course.
Trying to run it through padsp is even better, with glitches and stuttering galore.
I thought PulseAudio was supposed to fix Linux sound, not make it worse.
Sometimes the touchpad scroll inexplicably stops working, so I have to use the arrow keys.
Sometimes the arrow keys inexplicably stop working, so I have to use the touchpad scroll.
After a while, they spontaneously start working again.
Not a huge big deal, but if I’m browsing another computer’s files through SSH, and then move them around or extract a .zip, couldn’t it tell the other computer to do the work locally instead of transferring all the files over the network and then transferring them back when it’s finished? Super slow.
Is the screen lock password box supposed to shake around erratically when you enter the wrong password? It looks like a bug, but maybe it’s some basement nerd’s attempt at being cutesy.
Trying to play audio in Wine. It stops for no reason after 10 seconds, the program locks up, and then it screeches a burst of noise into my ears. It used to work fine, but now it locks up and hogs the CPU. Inexplicable as usual.
Why is my CPU throttled-down to 1.8 GHz instead of 2.0? Is it seriously overheating from playing a Flash video?
Why can’t I double-click on .sh files to launch them? Or right-click and open them with some kind of launcher? I thought there used to be a way to do that.
I set Simple Backup Suite to back up to a 1 TB drive on my other computer. However, the drive no longer mounts when the machine boots up, so it wasn’t making backups for months, with no warning or error messages of any kind.
So then I set it up to back up to another drive with a FAT filesystem. I checked after a few weeks and it had a bunch of folders of backups. Great, it’s working!
Except not really. Since it backs up everything to a single .tgz file, and FAT filesystems can only accept a maximum file size of 4.0 GiB, it’s been silently halting and leaving corrupt, useless backup files. Smooth.
Why do I need to manually refresh Nautilus after a file is created? I thought that used to be automatic.
STOP INTERRUPTING ME BY POPPING UP WINDOWS WHILE I’M TYPING! It’s 2010 and you still do this shit?!
Why is my CPU locked at 600 MHz!? I try to set it to back to normal and it just sits there and does nothing.