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 sections for the problem and the fix.) Let me say first that this might be unique, or almost unique, depending on your flavor of Linux and your hardware. The Issue I don't know exactly how or when this problem began, but I do know that I used Ubuntu exclusively as my OS for a good seven years (and same machine for five years) before the problem reared its ugly head. "The Problem" was that all of a sudden my mouse would "freeze," meaning the cursor of my wireless mouse froze and could not be moved—nor could I click on anything on the screen--without removing the mouse dongle from the USB port, then reinserting it. Unfortunat...

(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.) Scenario and Caveat I download and convert a LOT of public domain books. Sometimes the scanned pdf version is DRM-protected, for some reason that defies all logic for un-copyrighted works in the public domain, and probably defies all legality. I use Okular for my PDF reader/editor. I want to be able to open the pdf in Okular and make bookmarks and annotations. I also want to be able to highlight certain passages, and to be able to copy and paste certain sentences or paragraphs. Finally, often my end game is to produce a docx or odt version. I cannot do that as long as the pdf file is DRM-protected. I need a wa...

(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 .) Occasionally you might get a message in your Notifications area that the snap-store or a snap application needs to be updated but that you first need to close all snap applications to do so. That can be a bit puzzling and frustrating because you don't have ANY applications running, much less a snap application...as far as you can see. At the same time that you get the notifications message, if you open the Ubuntu Software application you probably will see something like this: Now, you can search for and find all sorts of software developer gobbledy-gook, along with a lot of amateur speculation regarding ...

(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.) Keyboard Freeze, Mouse Hesitation and USB Weirdness I know, this is not an Ubuntu issue as much as it is a general computing issue; still I think it is important to document and distribute, no matter what Operating System (OS) you use—mine just happens to be Ubuntu. The Issue In the past three to six months I have been experiencing "freezes" of both my keyboard (primarily) and my mouse (occasionally). After considerable research (including the mostly-worthless forums) and trying the few "solutions" that seemed reasonable, I was unable to avoid the issue just described. As I make my living ...

(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.) Apologies for posting about a problem and not offering a solution, but I just wanted to point our—once again—how useless the StackExchange forum is for most "normal" (non-programmer) Ubuntu users. After I upgraded my Ubuntu system to 22.04, this message started popping up upon starting or restarting my computer: mtd device must be supplied (device name is empty)? Because StackExchange seems to be the "official" Ubuntu forum, you  would think that something as prevalent and worrisome as this message might elicit a reply from someone who actually is involved in programming for the Ubuntu des...

When logging in after my Ubuntu 21.10 computer went to sleep, a "gjs is not responding" message popped up momentarily. Went to the forums and found nothing except the usual garbage and gibberish. Then I remembered that I had temporarily switched to the Wayland compositor to test a theory about why things don't look right in LibreOffice. I forgot to switch back to Xorg. After I switched back to Xorg, the gjs message no longer pops up. Wayland causes all sorts of issues on my machine; for instance, I cannot run wine at all if I am using Wayland. BTW, my LibreOffice issue mostly cleared up when I switched to Wayland, but, as I said, Wayland is troublesome for me in general—and my LO issue is somewhat annoying, but not critical—so I decided to stick with Xorg so that I can have more complete functionality of my computer. (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...

(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.) Over the years I have scanned and converted literally thousands of pdf files.  Most of those scans and conversions have been split between on-the-job tasks that required conversions of oil and gas leases and other documents, and personal projects in which I have converted hundreds of books, magazines and articles for various reasons that I will not go into here. Suffice it to say that I have spent thousands of hours working with pdf files, and when it comes to doing OCR on imaged files my favorite program to use is gscan2pdf .  I am tempted to say that it is a shame that there is not a Windows version of gsc...