I suppose it is a very effective approach to attack a lot of IT infrastructure. Like how much CI and build systems rely on you being able to pull an ubuntu image and run some apt on it. You halt build systems, cloud deployment, and probably much more.
Ok. What exactly is not working with the network? Are you on wired or wireless? If you do run ip a, does your interfaces show up?
Another thing to look at is journalctl -b. Look for errors, lines in red, anything about the network. If you can roll back to a functioning boot (or run journalctl -b -1 should show the previous boot) and compare to that is probably a good idea, journald (displayed by that command) may contain errors that are not relevant, so comparing to a functioning boot may be good.
Also, depending on how old your computer it, there may be another hdmi output which uses the GPU integrated to your CPU. If that is the case, you could switch to it if the nvidia card stops working just to troubleshoot, take a look at journalctl -b and look for errors again. If the screen just goes black, and does not boot, this may also give you some messages as to why the nvidia graphics is not coming up.
To the menu to the left, there is one item called “secure boot”, and sometimes “fast boot” is there. However, if your computer is booting at all, I’m not sure this is it. But try it, it will not hurt.
GTX 580? Maybe you have to install an older driver, like the 470-series of the driver appears to support it: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/ Ubuntu has a bunch of older series of nvidia driver you can install for this purpose.
That would not explain your networking though. Unless that is also some older hardware too… But, a common thing to do as a new user in linux may be to find posts which answer “how do I install x in ubuntu” and they usually involve editing files under /etc/apt/sources.d/. This can wreck your system in this kind of way, so: have you done that? Or this is pure ubuntu, just regular apt update/upgrade and some apt installs?
Still, huh? Yeah, that is why I stopped using it too.
How does OTR work on it nowadays, or have XMPP moved to some other encryption?
This is such an important thing to learn when using linux. If you want to be able to rescue your setup and not just reinstall: live usb!
To do a rescue on a system that does not boot, then you may also have to enter your environment and fix things, you do that by chroot. I always forget what steps are necessary, so I always look it up in the gentoo handbook: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Full/Installation#Chrooting It is the same principle with any live media.
What kind of issues would one observe from this bug?
I have serious issues with Cosmic. When I lock the screen and come back, then it has kills all terminals except the Cosmic terminal, firefox has become… broken, for the lack of a better word, where all new pages just give gray background color and no menu items work, and the sound is reset to the laptop speaker instead of hdmi, not the disolay though, only sound. Then fullscreening terminals also makes them crash, as in they seem to refuse to take input.
It is not really usable. But since nvidia on x11 in popos started resetting the display config when the screen went to sleep, it beats the alternative.
Look into a distro that you might like, and find a “live usb” of it, often it is the installation media itself. How it works is basically it is a linux already installed on a disk image you transfer to the usb, and tell the computer to boot from it. Instructions on all this usually comes with the live usb media. Then you usually get a “try it out” or “install” option, or it just leaves you at a pre-configured desktop. Click around, install stuff, browse the web, get a feel for it.
I don’t use .desktop files that much… But I guess xfce is X and not wayland. Check the DISPLAY env var for your user and set the same in your script there or run the binary with that env var.
I find it very useful, and it conflicts with normal copy paste very rarely. There are two clipboards, one is filled with latest highlighted, and the other with latest Ctrl+C:ed. Middle click pastes from the first, Ctrl+V from the second. This makes you able to copy two things at once: ctrl+c something first, highlight something else second, paste in any order. The confusing thing when learing to use it for me was that since I need to highlight to ctrl+c, I will overwrite what is in the middle click clipboard, and it also means you cannot highlight something to replace it with whats in your middle click clipboard. It does however mean that most times you want to do a ctrl+c/ctrl+v both clipboards are in sync. Not sure why, but I often find myself having to copy/paste two things at once, and I use both buffers without thinking. Which makes it impossible to use macos.
“Other Unix-like”, do they mean like open/free/netBSD and that class? Because macos does not have that, right? Only some terminals emulate that behaviour by overwriting the normal clipboard, making it very hard to switch between them.
Your control over the system is so great in Gentoo. While other distros may pull in a dependency you will never use – say like cups – gentoo allows you to remove the dependency by removing support for it at install/compile time.
I love how the portage packages are maintained, it is so easy to find which versions are available, select version, read about why a package is masked and having all the tools for overriding that decision by the package maintainers and install anyway. They inform you about important updates and migrations when you sync your package repository. It is also super easy to patch the code being installed.
I would not say portage is complicated. For most operations you just install a package, sync, and upgrade like you would in any distro. It tales time to do this, sure. What is complicated is, I would say, figuring out how to boot your machine. You want encrypted this or that, dropbear, systemd or openrc, want to manage your initramfs with dracut or make one yourself, distro-kernel or another flavour, and on and on. I also think that the wiki is not very detailed on a lot of what the different systems do and how they talk to each other.
Anyway, I love it. If I would start with Gentoo today, I would install a Gentoo Prefix
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Prefix
There you can get used to the portage package manager withour messing up your system and without doing a reinstall.
They should make a usb-port with a spring in it which can be released with eject. Until then I have to be content with just making sound effects when I run eject on other devices.
It is very common to use ACK in social contexts as well if you work in IT I have found. Like “had a meeting about that issue, awaiting ACK from John”