Luke's Ubuntu and Linux Hacks

(We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted section s for the problem and the fix.) SITUATION BRIEFING: When I first installed FreeFileSync, instead of just downloading the free (non-donation copy) from the FFS website , I decided to install the Flatpak version I found in Gnome Software. I don't want to say necessarily that was a mistake—but it would turn out to be a minor inconvenience when I later purchased and installed the Donation Edition of FFS.  I had only been using the free version of FFS for about a month when I decided to make a donation and opt for the Donation version of the software. Now, on the FFS web site I was reassured that I did not need to worry about uninstalling th...

(We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the FIX). SCENARIO:  Operating system is Ubuntu Linux 21.04 MyPassport USB drive attached. This drive is used both to back-up system using Déjà Dup, and to manually backup files from my hard drive. ISSUE: When moving files to Trash within the MyPassport directory, files are moved to MyPassport-created folders with names .Trash-1000, .Trash-1006, .Trash-1009, etc. Within these upper-level folders, one or more of the following sub-folders exist: expunged, files, info. One or more of the "files" folders will contain the unwanted / trashed folders and files. The unwanted / trashed folders and files cannot be permanently deleted from the MyPassport device using the...

(We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted sections for the problem and the fix.) After I upgraded from Ubuntu 20.10 to 21.04, updates kept returning the error message "ubuntu "security update"package failed."  After going through a long list of google search results, and trying mostly useless stuff, I came upon this solution at this location.    Be sure to note that I added a cd command (see below) to the instructions at the referenced location. Before you apply the solution below, borrowed from the location link above, be aware that my research and my many attempts at correcting this problem from the Terminal turned up one crucial, common phrase, which is:  dpkg: err...

 (We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted sections for the problem and the fix.) I ditched Microsoft OS completely and forever and installed Ubuntu Linux on all my machines roughly eight years ago. During that time, I have installed every upgrade, which amounts to somewhere around sixteen if you include version 21.04. I never had even a minor glitch on any of my machines until the very recent 21.04 upgrade attempted on an older Fujitsu laptop. Before you jump to any conclusions, no, I did not try to force the upgrade by using the terminal. I waited for the "official" upgrade to show up in Software Updater, which happened only today because of some problem that occurred on some...

  From the Ubuntu release announcement on their mailing list: Users of Ubuntu 20.10 will be offered an automatic upgrade to 21.04 in due course once an upgrade bug in the "shim" bootloader is fixed. For further information about upgrading, see:  https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop/upgrade  and  https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/19221/#heading--release-upgrades

  gscan2pdf Okay, so that's a really long title for a blog post, but sometimes you must use many words to explain what it really is that you are doing, a lesson learned by spending a lot of time on the mostly worthless forums where people have very little ability to form a subject line that has anything to do with their issue.  At any rate, some background. I love downloading public-domain (mostly) books and documents, but often they are scanned as image files. As I am a writer and want to use quotes from the pdf, it is much easier if I convert the picture pdf to a text pdf so I can copy and paste, rather than re-typing the  quoted material.  There are lots of ways to go about this conversion task, but often they require buying conversion software or paying to play in the cloud. I hate spending money on work stuff, so here's my simple, quick solution.  Install gscan2pdf. In Ubuntu, you can do that from the Ubuntu Software Centre or the Gnome Software Center. If ...

 I cannot survive (well, at least, I cannot do what I want and need to do) without Okular, the neat little pdf reader and more. So, I was quite distressed when I tried to launch it this morning and not only did it not launch, my Favorites icon was gone. I searched the (pretty much worthless) Ubuntu and linux forums seven ways from sundown, but was unable to find a solution. However, in all my searching, head-scratching and trying different things from the command line, I finally determined this. (Bear in mind, too, that after I install a program and use it for a year or so, I don't recall whether I installed it from Ubuntu Software, Gnome Software, Snapd or Flatpak.) First, I determined that there is no "native" Okular package in Ubuntu software. The program available in Ubuntu Software is a snapd package. So I went to the Terminal and entered: snap list and sure enough there were two Snap versions of Okular installed.  So I opened a terminal and tried to run Okular from...