/srv/irclogs.ubuntu.com/2022/09/23/#ubuntu-discuss.txt

lotuspsychjegood morning01:41
arraybolt3Not so much an Ubuntu discussion as an #ubuntu discussion, but how do you think we can give support in a way that doesn't underestimate a user's skill level? I find that I usually try to give support assuming that a user's skill level is low, but that gets pretty embarrassing when you end up treating power users, previous flavor leads, and Canonical employees as if they were on the same skill level as a relative newbie...02:52
arraybolt3(Like, I guess it's not too horribly embarrassing, but it's still kinda like "Uh... oops.")02:53
guiverc[m]great question, but does it matter?  If your intention is good, and you're careful with wording I can't see it be treated as anything but someone trying to help. I doubt anyone would read your responses as anything but helpful arraybolt3 02:54
* guiverc[m] just realizes this isn't IRC window... I wondered why it looks so different..02:55
* guiverc[m] misses not having my primary desktop working!02:55
arraybolt3Ah, good point.02:57
daftykinsit can be immensely condescending in my book03:01
daftykinsmaybe you can ask how many rodeos they've been to? :D03:01
arraybolt3Yeah, like I think I told the old Ubuntu Studio flavor lead (the guy before Erich) how to open System Settings and navigate to a particular menu to change a setting or some such. Probably overkill, though it would have been perfect for other people.03:02
daftykins:D03:04
arraybolt3I do try to adjust to a user's skill level so things go faster, and I guess unless I recognize the user name there's no way for me to know in advance how skilled they are. I would be worried of accidentally making a new user nervous if I asked them about their skill level, though.03:08
arraybolt3Like if I say "Open a terminal with Ctrl+Alt+T", and they say, "Oh that's the terminal shortcut, I rebound that to such-and-such, so lemme open Konsole..." I immediately know this person is likely to know what they're doing and can proceed to just saying, "Hmm, check your settings for XYZ and see if changing the value here helps."03:10
arraybolt3guiverc[m]: LOL I bet that was confusing.03:10
arraybolt3guiverc[m]: What happened to your primary desktop? Still power supply issues?03:11
* arraybolt3 needs to reboot, brb03:15
* arraybolt3 is back03:18
daftykins\o/03:18
arraybolt3(Had to run a short update, so it took me a bit longer than normal.)03:19
guiverc[m]it was ~14 days since my last reboot; and didn't reboot & update 20.04 (my stable system) during the day; so I just turned box off that night (instead of normal suspend..) thinking I'd boot into 20.04 next morning, update then switch back to kinetic.... I forgot due to PSU issues there was a great chance I'd not be able to cold boot... so I'm back dead system (yeah PSU)..  b/c of Queens death; yesterday/today are lots of stuff03:19
guiverc[m]closed so can't currently even replace it..  (till next week)03:19
daftykinsdoh!03:19
arraybolt3Argh, that's awful.03:20
arraybolt3I have a kinda similar problem with my laptop - if I leave it shut down or in sleep for too long, it goes into a weird glitchy mode and I have to mess with it in just the right way to get it to boot again.03:20
arraybolt3(I think a lightning storm fried some CMOS-related capacitor, since it started happening after a storm and taking out the CMOS battery significantly improved the situation.)03:21
guiverc[m]☚ī¸  it's nice to have stuff that just works... but we're lucky if we have other stuff we can use instead... (me and this box.. you hopefully have something else too)03:24
arraybolt3Actually taking out the CMOS battery on this laptop worked well enough that it's what I use most of the time. I am hoping to get an upgrade soon (like sometime within the next week).03:25
arraybolt3I also have a desktop that Just Works here, too, so even if this thing goes totally kaput I'm not entirely out of luck.03:26
arraybolt3guiverc[m]: This might be silly, but is the drive in your now-dead system a spinning HDD?03:26
arraybolt3I'm thinking you might be able to do something convoluted like disconnect the main HDD, power the system up from a flash drive, hotplug the HDD, then kexec into the kernel of the main system and pick up where you left off.03:27
arraybolt3(That's assuming your system supports SATA hotplugging, though.)03:27
guivercyou got a great smile from me arraybolt3 .... that sort of 'stupid' stuff is what I on occasion do... yeah drive is spinning rust; box has battery removed, dvd & other power eating stuff unplugged..  when I noted I was using element (not hexchat) I went & re-tried to get it going again & will try again later, but I need to replace the old 2009 box03:30
guiverc(I actually purchased a replacement for it [years ago]; but didn't like it as its video card made noise.. so that replacement didn't last long)03:32
arraybolt3guiverc: Yeah, it sounds like it's overdo for a replacement just on account of its age at this point (though I love keeping old hardware alive).03:32
arraybolt3Currently my main hardware is only three years younger at 2012 and is still going strong.03:32
* Bashing-om pats his ole 2007 Athlon system :P03:33
guiverc:)03:33
* daftykins pats his Pentium III Dell Dimension 410003:33
guivercI was stunned when I unplugged the box though; in the back were 3x USB-PS2 convertor cables.... (and I wonder what uses the power???   one keyboard for me when I stand, one for when I sit, and one when I'm back on the exercise bike..)03:34
arraybolt3Somewhere in a back corner I have almost exactly one of these laptops around here: https://www.ebay.com/itm/175420534697?hash=item28d7e0efa9:g:BFgAAOSwawNjHhlL03:34
arraybolt3(Compaq Presario Windows XP, the ports are in different locations I believe, and it's AMD, not Intel, but that laptop looks almost exactly like the one I've got.)03:35
arraybolt3guiverc: LOL well that's one way to always stay online :)03:35
arraybolt3daftykins: I still have an original Intel Pentium that I scavenged out of a Windows 95 system that died (probably also due to PSU issues!) long ago.03:36
daftykinshehe03:36
arraybolt3I think it's some 70MHz lump of junk or something like that.03:36
daftykinscome to think, my Dad still has the Pentium 1 120 MHz i grew up with, he kept that quiet from my mum03:37
daftykinsbed for me! \o03:38
guivercI've got an pentium MMX under the house..  my loading bench; runs IBM DOS 5.0203:38
guivercnight daftykins 03:38
arraybolt3guiverc: Wow. That's an old CPU. I wonder what kind of RAM it uses?03:40
arraybolt3(Maybe from back in the era of SIMMs?)03:40
arraybolt3I have an old book, "Troubleshooting, Maintaining, and Repairing PCs" with a ton of info on DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95 in it (mostly Win95 IIRC, also lots of hardware stuff). Also came with a CD full of shareware and freeware diagnostic programs. That was fun to dig through. One of the tools was a formatter for dead floppy disks that got them back into a somewhat usable condition, it was able to run on Windows XP and 03:42
arraybolt3appeared to actually work sometimes!03:42
arraybolt3(The tool wasn't designed for XP, but it still ran despite the fact that it was for a much older OS.)03:43
guivercarraybolt3, i went and looked; box specs I've got on side say on 64MB of 72-pin RAM,  it contains 3xHDDs though; 2x 340MB & 1 other that I couldn't read but I think slightly more (was 385MB a valid WD size?)03:44
arraybolt3No clue about the 385 MB on the drive, but wow. Drive sizes were in MB back then? Even my Windows 95 drive was about 2 GB or so, I think.03:45
guivercfyi.  that box has twice been replaced by boxes running GNU/Linux.. but each died; last I think ran Ubuntu 11.10 if I recall correctly... but I usually use an old thinkpad t42p with debian on it & external keyboard/mouse as that has ethernet & I don't need to power up coaxial conversion too (pentium M box uses coax BNC)03:48
guiverc(external keyboard just me... loading = ammo loading; I consider it dirty so don't want to take any device there I use elsewhere)03:49
arraybolt3Something makes me think that the older computers were designed more robustly. I've had multiple "newer" systems mostly die or break badly, while an archaic Windows 2000 box with a REFURBISHED hard drive still booted up last I tried.03:49
arraybolt3("newer" because the systems were still old - Windows XP era seemed to be when things started dying for no good reason, at least in my world)03:50
guivercmaybe I was just lucky... the loading machine I probably have on only once or twice a month these days.. so it's mostly collecting dust, not operating..03:52
=== popey0 is now known as popey
guivercwow, I just noted https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python3.10/+bug/1990586   (I've seen users on askubu report this)03:57
ubottuLaunchpad bug 1990586 in apt (Ubuntu) "22.04: python3* mismatched phasing breaks dist-upgrades" [Critical, Incomplete]03:57
arraybolt3Yikes!04:16
arraybolt3Something similar happened with Kubuntu, where the phasing messed something up and tried to uninstall important things.04:16
guivercit'll impact all flavors I suspect.. 04:30
marcoagpintomorning05:08
lotuspsychjebe careful with that tomy fella, he's known for trolling in the past10:57
ograthx for the headsoup 🙂10:58
lotuspsychjeoerheks: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/09/audacity-3-2-realtime-effects-at-last12:21
arraybolt3For next time anyone runs into a question about packages being held back: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1431940/what-are-phased-updates-and-why-does-ubuntu-use-them16:09
leftyfbarraybolt3: you could update the official documentation for it https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PhasedUpdates16:42
arraybolt3leftyfb: ...Forgot I could do that, that's probably a good idea!16:51
arraybolt3leftyfb: How should I best approach that documentation page? It looks more like a pre-implementation announcement or some such, and I don't want to accidentally plow over the top of historically significant info.16:57
arraybolt3(I don't know if I should carefully update the parts that could use it, or if I should overhaul the whole thing and replace it with a modern, up-to-date explanation of phased updates.)16:58
rbasakarraybolt3: I would overhaul the whole thing but try not to lose information. But ultimately, I'd favour improvement over the fear of losing something. That's the point of a wiki, and old versions of the page are easy to fetch with the revision history stuff.17:00
rbasakJust be careful to ensure the correctness of what you say of course, please.17:01
arraybolt3Oh cool! I didn't realize that the Wiki stored old versions of info. OK, then I'll look into doing that.17:01
arraybolt3(And yes, obviously I'll be careful to make sure the info is accurate.)17:01
rbasakThat's part of the entire premise of wikis :)17:02
arraybolt3Huh, sure enough, I see it! /me hasn't spent too much time in the Wiki interface and hardly know how it works except for "you press edit and change stuff and it shows up" :P17:02
arraybolt3(OK I know a bit more than that but you get my point.)17:03
=== EriC^^_ is now known as EriC^^
murmelis somewhere documented which patches get upstreamed and which not? (sadly enough I am kinda locked in into ubuntu as of right now with my laptop)20:26
daftykinsthere's nothing sad about that20:27
murmeldaftykins: idk, when your hw only ever works good on ubuntu, but on no other distro I do find it quite sad20:28
murmelwe are a community of sharing, not trying to locking in (i assume)20:28
daftykinsi would have thought it makes more sense to be happy it works anywhere20:29
daftykinswhat is it, a bleeding edge model?20:29
murmeldaftykins: 4 year old laptop which was initially sold with ubuntu 16.04 (afair not certified)20:30
murmel(dell)20:30
daftykinsah one of the developer edition types?20:30
murmeldaftykins: no latitude 20:31
murmeleh missing a ,20:31
daftykinsthat's a model name, developer edition was still a label they added onto some models to say they shipped with Ubuntu20:32
murmeldaftykins: dell latitude 549020:32
JanCmurmel: if it works in Ubuntu but not other kernels, it's probably some out of upstream kernel patch that can't be upstreamed, or maybe a closed source driver?21:33
JanCDell itself upstreams a lot too, so...21:35
JanCwhat doesn't work with other distros?21:35
murmelJanC: it's not about the kernel, it's stuff around it, afaik, but the kernel plays a part21:40
murmelat least the -oem kernel does things different (and makes it worse on ubuntu)21:40
JanC?21:41
murmelJanC: intel panel self refresh21:41
murmelanother issue I have (but it's the same on all linux distros, is that my laptop crashes when the screen is turned off21:41
murmelwithout any logs21:41
JanCah, probably some sort of firmware bug21:41
JanCthat they have to work around...21:42
murmelJanC: yeah I gave up on that, as dell won't probably fix a 4 year old bug21:42
murmelbut the intel panel self refresh is working on ubuntu but no other distro21:42
JanCno newer BIOS/UEFI updates than you already have?21:42
murmeleven debian has that issue (but not as bad as other distros)21:43
murmellatest (which is from last month or so)21:43
JanCcan you make it work easily on other kernels with a kernel module parameter or such?21:43
murmelnope21:43
murmelon other distros I have to turn off plymouth and i915.enable_psr=0 to make it work21:44
murmelotherwise my screen gets corrupted and turns off after a while (which crashes the system)21:44
JanCit's probably a hack that wouldn't be accepted upstream as-is21:44
JanC(just my guess)21:45
murmelyeah I guessed so, otherwise I assume it would have been upstreamed21:45
murmeloh well, seems like I am stuck on ubuntu (as even windows has it's issues on this hardware, related to the crashing)21:47
daftykinsthat's an alarm bell right there21:48
JanCsounds like some nasty hardware bug21:48
murmelyeah, will be my last dell _ever_21:48
murmelputting the laptop to sleep works on windows (crashes on linux), but when I let the system idle even windows crashes when the display turns off21:49
daftykinsthat makes no sense whatsoever, i deal with tonnes and none have problems with Windows21:49
murmeldaftykins: you can see the laptop in action if you go to the ubuntu summit in prague :P21:49
daftykinsone wobbly machine doth not a rule create21:51
murmeli know. still sucks to be the one person to be affected :(21:51

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