Ubuntu

What do you do when your Linux machine boots in a Grub prompt, and never proceeds to loading Linux and getting you a login prompt?

This happened to me a few weeks ago, and searching resulted in old advice that didn't work for me.
By the way, I am on Xubuntu 24.04 LTS, with UEFI, but this may apply to other distros.

Among things that you could try are:

• Hit Enter
• Type 'boot' then hit Enter

Other advice was to mount the EFI partition and so on.

What ended up working in my case is what I describe in the rest of the article.

When you upgrade a package on Linux Debian/Ubuntu, you need to restart any binaries that are running in order for bug fixes and security patches to take effect. Failure to do so, may leave programs open to exploits. The same applies to the Linux kernel itself.

PAM (Linux Pluggable Authentication Modules) has become very verbose in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, causing excessive logging of various events. This has the annoying side effect of making the logs too big, and hard to find information in. It also causes log summarizing programs, such as Logwatch, to generate larger reports.

The goal of this page is to detail how to suppress excessive logging by PAM.

Like many people, I need to upgrade from the used laptop that I am using, to a newer (still used) laptop. This is usually every 3 years or so.

Because I don't want to install the operating system that I use (Xubuntu Linux) from scratch when doing so, I used to remove the disk in the old computer, and install it in the new one, and things would work right away, with all my applications still there, and my desktop the way it is when I shutdown the older computer.

In recent long term support (LTS) releases of Ubuntu, Canonical has been adding more and more packages that are installed using snapd.

Snapd is a package manager that relies on static linking of dependencies, contrary to over two decades of Linux managing dependencies via dynamic linking, with Debian being the pioneer of this approach.

A few months ago, Ubuntu started pushing ads for their Ubuntu Pro service to the command line interface apt command. When you run the apt command from the terminal, you see this message:

Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines. Learn more at https://ubuntu.com/pro

Then about a week ago, more messages were pushed about the ESM service saying that more packages that can be upgraded if you subscribe to that service.

When I was running Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS on my home server, I had installed minidlna as a media server that is accessible to DLNA capable clients, including a Smart TV where one can view photos on a large screen.

However, when the server was upgraded to 14.04 LTS, minidlna stopped working. Searching Google turned up forum posts from 2014 with instructions that no longer work.

In mid June, my laptop hard disk died. Suddenly, there was a flurry of disk I/O wait, then applications started to report errors trying to write anything.

With a 500GB 2.5" laptop disk lying around that was used for backup, I replaced the dead disk with this one.

I had an Ubuntu Server 14.04 CD lying around, and therefore did not bother to download Kubuntu 14.04.

My laptop's home directory is backed up daily via ssh to the server. So my data was safe.

Since I moved from cable TV to free HDTV over-the-air (OTA) ATSC TV, I have been using the Homeworx HW-150PVR as a PVR (personal video recorder) for HD TV.

If you are, like me, an Ubuntu user who is annoyed when doing aptitude full-upgrade because it stops and displays the changelog until you press "q", then here is why this happens, and how to change the behavior.

The reason this happens is that the package apt-listchanges is installed on your system. This package lists the changes before applying them.

However, by default, it stops the upgrade process until the user has provided input. The silly part is that there are no choices at this point, the user must dismiss the output and nothing else can be done.