Ubuntu: Crash and Burn

Ubuntu gave me a birthday present. Yes, on my 73rd birthday, Ubuntu offered up a complete meltdown of my laptop's functionality: no mouse, no trackpad, no keyboard. So much for the 20.04 stable release! I couldn't be bothered trouble-shooting and simply reinstalled the operating system. Everything works fine again now, although I have to reinstall Astrolog and Calibre for starters.

It's not the first time this has happened. I made a post titled Mouse, Trackpad and Keyboard Freeze in Ubuntu on 15th March 2022. I'd forgotten that I'd solved the problem back then by holding down the option key while rebooting. At that time, I blamed the problem on keyboard remapping software Kinto that I hadn't properly uninstalled. In hindsight, that may not have been the cause at all. I fully removed what I thought was the offending software with a program called Stacer. 

I've tried to reinstall this Stacer and apparently succeeded but it doesn't launch. I installed it before using Flatpak but doesn't install either. So frustrations get heaped on top of frustrations. I don't have the patience to deal with these problems anymore. I just want an operating system that works and that's what I had by and large with Mac OS. 

This "crash and burn" of Ubuntu is disappointing and reminds that I need to store any important files online for easy retrieval later. My Astrolog charts are gone but I had already set up the Airtable database containing the original data, so the charts can be recreated. Likewise I may have lost a few books from my Calibre library. I'm not sure what their titles were but, if I remember them, they can be added again. The incident has motivated me to get organised.

I thought that I may as well install the latest version of Ubuntu now that I'm up and running again. My reason for sticking with the long term stable release was ... its stability! So I set about downloading the latest release, version 21.04 released in April of 2021. Not so fast.

Of course, there's no network problem but hey, who cares? I considered reinstalling Mac OS just to sidestep all this nonsense and actually set about doing it, following instructions at this site:

I got to the point where installation of Big Sur was about to start but a connection with the Apple server couldn't be established and so the installation was aborted. It's recommended that an Ethernet connection be used for downloading and so I should try this before giving up altogether ... but not tonight. I don't want to spend the remainder of my birthday dealing with technological issues.

Before closing, I must point out that my latest annoyance is the brightness of the screen now varying. This is a minor problem but nonetheless annoying. The operating system may be the cause or it may simply be  the result of old age. My poor old battery registers 46% when fully charged. No matter. Life goes on.

Reviving My Kindle

Read this 2013 review of the device

I'm trying to renew my relationship with my venerable Kindle Paperwhite 6th Generation that I purchased in China back in 2014 or thereabouts. It still works fine but I've been neglecting it. I tend to watch alternative news videos on the Internet and read short articles but my actual digestion of books has slowed considerably over the past six months. I also spend perhaps too much time watching movies and various television series. 

This is an unhappy situation that I am trying to address. This evening I came across a short video by one of my favourite historians, David Irving, in which he was talking about 1956 Hungarian uprising. In researching for a book about this topic, he become aware via CIA files that he had access to, that in its initial days at least it was an anti-Jewish uprising. The book he wrote is titled "Uprising" and I have a copy of it in my Calibre library. I used my Kindle email address to mail it to myself so it was in the Amazon Cloud and then downloaded it to my Kindle. It is now ready for reading.

I wasn't sure whether David Irving was still alive but he is, now aged 84. I'm interested in the Hungarian Uprising because it was the first time that I was made aware of world events. I was aged seven in 1956 and I remember the nuns at the school I attended being very grim-faced about what was happening. Like most historical events, it has been simplified to the point where I seven-year old could understand it. The brave people of Hungary rose up against their Russian Communist oppressors but were ruthlessly subdued. That's it.

As David Irving explains however, 1945 marked the return of the Jews who had fled Hungary during the war and they were put into positions of power in the newly established Hungarian government, especially in the secret police. This marked the beginning of a period of unprecedented suffering for the Hungarian people. Anyway I'm looking forward to reading his book and I must aim to read at least one book a month. I've been making my way slowly through Robert Kennedy's "The Real Anthony Fauci" on my iPhone but I need to set aside regular sessions for reading to make reasonable progress.

I've now have Robert Kennedy's book on my Kindle so I'll continue reading it from there. The problem with reading on my iPad is that it's now quite old (bought in 2015) and the battery is quite weak. My iPhone is new and the battery is still strong but continuing to read on this device will unnecessarily drain the battery, The strength of the Kindle is that one can read for hours on end without recharging and my Kindle battery remains quite strong even after eight years. 

So this can be considered my birthday resolution: READ MORE BOOKS!

Flatpak Installation Now Working

For whatever reason, my installation of flatpak is now working. I followed the terminal steps as outlined on this site, a screenshot of which is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

I went to flathub.org and practised installing a free software program called Plots.

Figure 2

It took quite some time for the installation to complete but it eventually did and the program is up and working now.  I described flatpak in my post of Friday, 11 March 2022 titled Installing Calibre and Other Software on Ubuntu. 

Unfortunately, the webcam is still not working despite trying out numerous suggestions from within and without the Ubuntu help community. It's not a deal breaker as I rarely ever used in my Mac OS anyway. It's still annoying and I'd eventually like to resolve the problem.

Mouse, Trackpad and Keyboard Freeze in Ubuntu

Life with Ubuntu is never dull and predictable. Last night I discovered that my mouse, trackpad and keyboard on my Mac laptop had all frozen. This had happened a few days earlier and the problem had been resolved with a reboot. However, as I was tired, I simply shut it down and planned to restart it in the morning.

That proved to be overly optimistic. After the morning reboot, the problem persisted. I tried a couple more times. I removed the USB receiver for my Logitech mouse and tried again. Still no change. I searched online but most help involved using the terminal and I had no keyboard. It was looking like a reinstallation would be necessary but, if that were needed, I would not be installing Ubuntu again but another version of Linux.

However, I decided to reboot while pressing the option key which brings up the boot menu. When I did this the mouse, trackpad and keyboard all worked. There was only the Ubuntu on the hard drive to boot from so I chose this and hoped for the best. With the OS loaded, everything worked and life was back to normal.

It was certainly odd that all input options failed at the same time and I felt that I should investigate further to try to get to the bottom of the problem as it is likely to recur. I remembered that I had been initially frustrated that Command+C for copy and Command+V for paste no longer worked. Instead Control+C and Control+V had to be used instead. 

With this problem in mind I installed an app called Kinto that supposedly remapped the keyboard. However, I never got the program to work properly but the icon continued to display on my list of apps. It was only after installing Stacer that I found that Kinto was loading at Startup. I was then able to delete it and I suspect that this was the source of the problem. See Figure 1.

Figure 1

I came across Stacer in a 2017 post titled The 10 Easiest Ways to Keep Ubuntu System Clean that has quite a few good tips including:

• $ sudo apt-get autoremove (to remove unnecessary packages and dependencies)
• $ sudo rm -rf ~/.cache/thumbnails/* (the number of thumbnails can build up over time)
• $ sudo apt-get clean (remove all cache files)

Installing Calibre and Other Software on Ubuntu

At long last, I've managed to get Calibre working under Ubuntu 20.04 on my 2013 Mac Book Pro. I just followed the recommended procedure using the terminal as outlined on the Calibre website:

sudo -v && wget -nv -O- https://download.calibre-ebook.com/linux-installer.sh | sudo sh /dev/stdin

I'm sure I tried this before but perhaps whatever bug was stopping Calibre from working before has now been fixed. Calibre and the Windows-based Astrolog were the two programs that I really wanted to get working under Ubuntu and now I've succeeded.

My VPN is also working and so the laptop is fully functional again from my perspective. There's nothing that I was doing under the Mac OS that I can't now do in Ubuntu. On the general topic of software installation, I watched an interesting YouTube video titled Flatpak Tutorial - Setting up Flatpak and installing Packages:

The author references the FLATPAK website that explains how to install the software on the various Linux distributions and FLATHUB that lists the software available for installation once FLATPAK has been installed. I managed to install it on my granddaughter's HP Pavilion x360 so far attempts to install it on my 2013 Mac Book have failed. I'll keep trying. Nothing of course is ever easy or straightforward with Linux.

There's no urgency as the normal software installation works fine. I've just installed Stellarium and TexStudio and TexMaker without any issues.

Pinta: a Simple Image Editor for Ubuntu

Nothing is ever easy in Ubuntu. For anybody who just wants to get a job done, such as simply adding text to a screenshot, Ubuntu is not the operating system for you. I quite frequently need to add text to a screenshot and this was a painless process in Mac OS, using Preview. Doing the same thing in Ubuntu becomes an adventure, as I'll now describe.

I'm familiar with GIMP but I didn't want to use a program of that complexity for such a simple task. It didn't take too long to discover that Pinta was the software application that would serve my purpose best and so I went to the Ubuntu Software Centre to download it. See Figure 1.

Figure 1

Using the terminal's sudo apt install pinta was unsuccessful as certain files couldn't be downloaded. The Ubuntu Help Centre however, is always "helpful". I came across the following revelation:

This issue has existed for a long time. Ubuntu's Snap store isn't well-maintained and doesn't perform properly. As a result, in Jammy 22.04, they've chosen to use Gnome software instead. Gnome software is working fine without any issues. You can install gnome-software using: sudo apt install gnome-software.

Of course, I'm running Ubuntu 20.04, the long term stable release version of the OS and so I had to install it from the terminal. Once I'd done that Pinta was displayed within the little suitcase icon and I've added both the Gnome Software Centre and Pinta to my favourites on the sidebar. See Figure 2.

Figure 2

This installation wasn't totally without drama either but eventually I succeeded and have been successfully adding text to my screenshots. I've still to get my webcam working but this isn't a high priority as I don't really use it. I'd really like to get Calibre working however, so this is a more immediate challenge. However, one step at a time.

Previously, when I had Ubuntu installed as a virtual machine within my Mac OS, I could always run back to the latter if I had problems but now I have nowhere to run and so I'm forced to find solutions. So far, the solution to the fan problem referred to in my previous post is holding up so I'm well pleased.

Fan Problems in Ubuntu 20.04

One of the problems that I noted following installation of Ubuntu 20.04 on my 2013 Mac Book Pro was that the fan was running almost continuously, even if the workload was light. This was becoming quite annoying. Apparently other people have been having the same problem. For example, this Ubuntu user wrote to Ask Ubuntu in August of 2020:

I have a Lenovo Ideapad with Ubuntu 20.04 in it. 

Even when my computer is at idle and using less than 5% of processing power and less than 1 GB ram my computers fan makes loud noise and it runs every time .

My idle CPU temperature resides in the range of 40C to 45C which is medium hot. The weird thing is that the fan runs at really at high speed even when RAM being used is less than 1 GB and processing power being used is less than 5% and it is really annoying.

Hope i can get some help with this.

Fortunately, help was forthcoming:

Initially my fans were running a lot too. But installing TLP worked really well for me. Fans rarely spin now and the system stays cool. Just follow: sudo apt install tlp for Ubuntu. For other distributions and OS, follow Official TLP documentation.

The discussion continued:

TLP is to save battery not to correct fan speed which runs continuously on Ubuntu.

ACV on Nov 14, 2021 at 16:55

Actually don't you think it's kind of inter-related? TLP helps in killing/slowing-down those processes which are not being actively used by the system which ultimately decreases the load on the CPU and hence slows the fan down.

CapTen101 on Nov 14, 2021 at 17:31 

It happened every time when my notebook went to idle that the fan started to spin crazy. Even though I closed everything. For some reason TLP fixed the issue for me too. 

Zoltán Süle on Jan 20 at 15:53

That's exactly what I was talking about!

CapTen101 on Jan 21 at 9:44 

Figure 1 shows what the TLP website has this say once TLP has been installed.

Figure 1

Having done all this, I'm happy to report that the fan problem has diminished noticeably. Fingers crossed that this continues.  Even though problems like this are annoying, the good thing about Ubuntu is that there is plenty of online help available so that solutions can generally be found.