ubuntu Archives - apt get life

Install Jetbrains Toolbox on Ubuntu 22.04

2023/02/17 by sudo Leave a Comment

If you have access to more than one of the JetBrains products I have found using the toolbox to install and manage them can be more convenient than the snap packages in Ubuntu itself. I often find it quite interesting to load up JetBrains Toolbox and see what new applications are available (since i don’t get email updates from them).

To install the JetBrains Toolbox on Ubuntu 22.04, first the following package will need to be installed:

sudo apt install libfuse2

Now download the JetBrains Toolbox from their website: https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox-app/

Once downloaded extract the zip/tar.gz changing the version number as appropriate

tar xvzf ~/Downloads/jetbrains-toolbox-1.27.2.13801.tar.gz

run it either via command line ./jetbrains-toolbox or via the UI. It should install the toolbox and it should appear in the system tray.

Fixing Ubuntu black screen with blinking cursor

2023/02/16 by sudo 6 Comments

After doing a system update, my Ubuntu 22.04 desktop would not present a login screen. Instead it displayed a black screen with a white blinking cursor at the top. Resetting the PC didn’t fix the issue. The following outlines steps I took to solve the problem.

The first thing to do is drop into a terminal using ctrl + alt + F4 This should present you with a command line login screen. Since in my case the cursor appears before the login screen it’s probably that there’s an issue with a graphics driver or gnome display manager. Running sudo systemctl restart gdm may yield a result if you then return to the original session using ctrl + alt + F1 however if you still see the blinking cursor return to the terminal session on F4.

Knowing my issue occurred after an update, I decided the next best thing to do would be purge the nvidia drivers from the system. They’ve caused me problems in the past and splatting them has fixed the issue before. To remove all references to the nvidia drivers on the system run the following commands one after the other (note that they do prompt in their current state and the first one may take some time to complete):

sudo apt pruge ~nvidia
sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt clean

Once that’s done, I ran the following update and upgrade commands to make sure the system was as up to date as it could be:

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

finally I rebooted the system

sudo reboot

This brought up the login prompt – all be it in the wrong resolution, which given that the display drivers have been stripped from the system is to be expected. I was able to login and then I could use the additional drivers tool to select a new set of nvida drivers. After installing those and rebooting again the system resolution was restored to default and the login was still working.

Setting up Display Link drivers on Ubuntu 20.04

2020/06/23 by sudo Leave a Comment

I’ve purchased a Dell “universal” USB 3/USB C docking station featuring Display Link, essentially allowing you to use it to drive external displays with the intention of using it for my laptop when sat at a desk with external monitor, mouse and keyboard. Since I run Ubuntu or Linux Mint as my primary operating system, some extra steps were required to install the Display Link drivers.

The first thing you need to do is download the Display Link drivers from the official website: https://www.displaylink.com/downloads/ubuntu

Once downloaded, it’s a reasonably straight forward process to install the drivers. First thing that’s required is to install pre-requisites

sudo apt-get install dkms libdrm-dev

Next run the downloaded file replacing the version number with whatever the one you downloaded is. (Note, this command assumes you’re in the appropriate directory already):

sudo ./displaylink-driver-5.3.1.34.run

Once finished you should have a message asking if you are running xorg and if you want to reboot. It’s actually best to reboot regardless of your display driver, so select Y for yes and let your machine reboot. Then you should be able to plug in your USB dock and your external devices with them all working.

For more information, the Display Link website actually has some good resources. Checkout their Ubuntu setup guide here: https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/684649

Setting up a bond and a bridge in Netplan on Ubuntu Server 20.04

2020/06/03 by sudo 2 Comments

I’m in the process of updating my KVM servers from Ubuntu 18.04 to Ubuntu 20.04. Along with the new version of Ubuntu there’s been some changes in netplan.

What I’ve done is edit the default file created after the Ubuntu Server installation /etc/netplan/00-installer-config.yaml and setup the following:

network:
  bonds:
    bond0:
      interfaces:
      - eno1
      - eno2
      parameters:
        mode: active-backup
  ethernets:
    eno1: {}
    eno2: {}
  version: 2
  bridges:
    br0:
      dhcp4: true
      interfaces:
        - bond0
      mtu: 1500
      parameters:
        stp: false
        forward-delay: 4

This has my two interfaces eno1 and eno2 and created bond0 as an active backup. There’s a few different networking modes you can chose from:

Bond Mode	Description
balance-rr	Round robin network configuration. Packets are send in sequential order from the first connection listed, going down the chain
active-backup	Only the first connection is used, unless it fails, in which case another connection is used
balance-xor	This uses a transmission policy to route between interfaces and provides both load balancing and fault tolerance
broadcast	Not sure why you’d use this – sends data on all interfaces
802.3ad	This is an IEEE standard. It does require switches to support the same protocol. This mode aggregates the connection to provide the benefit of bandwidth from all configured interfaces.
balance-tlb	Manages load between the the network adapters based on demand and availability
balance-alb	Includes both transmission load balancing (balance-tlb) and receive load balancing.

Then, the bridge br0 connects to bond0. This is where you configure the network type – DHCP or static IP. In this case I’m using DHCP as the firewall I have in place manages IP address assignments and it has the server set to a static address. If you want to specify a static IP address in this configuration file, you can do it like below:

network:
  bonds:
    bond0:
      interfaces:
      - eno1
      - eno2
      parameters:
        mode: active-backup
  ethernets:
    eno1: {}
    eno2: {}
  version: 2
  bridges:
    br0:
      addresses:
        - 192.168.10.30/24
      dhcp4: false
      gateway4: 192.168.10.1
      nameservers:
        addresses:
          - 192.168.10.1
          - 192.168.10.2
        search: []
      interfaces:
        - bond0

You can find out more information here:
https://netplan.io/examples

There’s a version of this post for 18.04 here (see the comments with suggested fixes):
https://www.aptgetlife.co.uk/setting-up-a-bond-and-bridge-in-netplan-on-ubuntu-18-04/

mount disk image created with dd using ubuntu

2017/03/05 by sudo

If you’ve cloned a whole drive using dd and you need to access one of the partitions on it here are some steps to follow in order to gain access:

Find the partition start sectors using fdisk -b512 -l. Note that you’re explicitly setting the sector size to 512 bytes and you’ll need to change your command to match your own image file.

fdisk -b512 -l backup_sata.img

You should get output similar to this (note I’ve truncated it to only show the appropriate output):

Device         Boot     Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
backup_sata.img1 *         2048    206847    204800   100M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
backup_sata.img2         206848 237185023 236978176   113G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
backup_sata.img3      237185024 588070911 350885888 167.3G  f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
backup_sata.img4      588070912 625137663  37066752  17.7G 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE
backup_sata.img5      237187072 588070911 350883840 167.3G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Normally sector are 512 bytes, so you can calculate the offset you need in the next command with:

start * 512 = offset

So if you want to mount backup_sata.img5 (partition 5 of the backup image) you’d run 237187072×512=121439780864:

mount -o ro,loop,offset=121439780864 backup_sata.img /backup_sata

Remember to have created /backup_sata or whatever directory you’re mounting to first!