random PC tips

How to make your linux drive image smaller with zerofree and virtualbox-manage First you need to write zeroes on top of old unallocated data (the files you have deleted) on the virtual drive. This is done with zerofree. zerofree will only overwrite unallocated data so the Virtualbox drive image file will not get any bigger than it already is. Then we use vboxmanage to compact the virtual disk image. Note that this will not work if you are using an encrypted hard disk. This is because the zeroes written by zerofree will be encrypted. In that case, the virtual disk image will grow to it's full size. 1. Install zerofree First, install zerofree on your virtual machine: sudo apt install zerofree 2. Log in to recovery mode Log in to your machine in recovery mode. At startup, press shift to see GRUB menu. Select Advanced options and recovery mode for the newest kernel. Then select Root from the menu. Press enter when it asks you to "Press enter for maintenance". 3. Remount the d...

 I had some problems logging into my brand new Xubuntu 24.04 LTS install running on Virtualbox. On the first login, I was booted back to the login screen. Opening some apps would also throw me out of the GUI session to the login screen. Eventually, I got into a loop where I get continually thrown into a login screen. This bug is mentioned on the Xubuntu homepage as a known issue: Xorg crashes and the user is logged out after logging in or switching users on some virtual machines  Seems that this bug also affects Ubuntu 24.04 . To get a terminal from the login screen, I pressed Ctrl-Alt-F1 and logged in. To get back to the GUI login, you can press Ctrl-Alt-F7. To fix the problem, I had to remove libva-wayland2: sudo apt remove libva-wayland2  After this, login is possible again in GUI mode (Ctrl-Alt-F7). However, this also uninstalled some apps I wanted. Looks like I have to skip Xubuntu 24.04 or Ubuntu 24.04 for now until this is fixed.

I was trying Fortnite on a laptop but got the following error: The installed version of the Intel graphics driver has known issues. Please install the latest driver version. Would you like to visit the following URL to download the driver? https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/80939/Graphics Intel(R) UHD Graphics Installed: 30.0.101.1122 Minimum required: 30.0.101.1404 First, I tried to update the driver through Device Manager with Windows Update. To try this, right-click your graphics adapter in Device Manager and select Update. But there was no newer update available. I then tried to update my drivers with the software Intel Support Assistant. But after updating the drivers, I still got the error message! Then I checked my laptop model and googled what graphics adapter it has. I went through that original link again, selected the graphics card type by hand and downloaded the newest driver, and now finally the error message is gone. So there you have i...

Many people seem to have a problem on their PC where a process called CxUiUSvc is eating all the RAM memory. This is caused by a faulty audio driver that seems to be totally useless. The problem seems to appear on HP and Lenovo laptops among others. A driver update might help you, but that is unlikely, since Conexant has stopped operations and will no longer provide updates. The fix to the problem is to stop the CxUiUSvc service and disable it in Windows Services. Stopping the service has seemingly no effect your audio will continue working normally.  Some sites and people recommend setting the service to start manually. This however is reported to cause the service to start again automatically after a few days. Setting the service to disabled should stop it from starting again by itself. Here is a good tutorial on how to disable services. Use the instructions in the tutorial to change the startup type of the CxUiUSvc service to disabled. Some sources: HP forums discussing this iss...

Glances screenshot from the Glances documentation I wanted to have an easy way to monitor how my server is doing. Glances is a software that gives you a good overview of your system. So I decided to install it. I have a headless Ubuntu Linux server machine for random programming and hobby projects. It runs a web server and a couple of other services. With "headless" I mean the server doesn't have a monitor or a desktop environment. I also have Home Assistant installed on a Raspberry Pi 4. I wanted to bring the monitoring data there for easy review. Glances allows one to do that. It provides a web interface for directly checking the status of the machine and an API for Home Assistant to gather status data. Glances installation the Ubuntu way is problematic I first tried to install Glances using the built-in package manager apt. This proved to be a bad idea for two reasons. First off, the Glances version that you will get with apt is outdated. Especially if you have an olde...

Finding stuff on the Android ScummVM app is not the most intuitive process, but it pays out! Finding the game folder on Android ScummVM is not very straightforward, so I decided to write this quick guide. I already wrote a guide on how to install and play Curse of Monkey Island on Android , but didn't elaborate on how to find the game folder on the app. Firstly, ScummVM is an awesome open-source collection of game engines capable of running many old point & click classics . In addition to the first three Monkey Island games, you can play Blade Runner, Broken Sword, Day of the Tentacle, Elvira, Full Throttle, Gabriel Knight, Grim Fandango, Indiana Jones, King's Quest, Kyrandia, Lands of Lore, Leisure Suit Larry, Longest Journey, Loom, Myst, Police Quest, Quest for Glory, Sam & Max, Simon the Sorcerer, Space Quest, The Dig, Ultima, Waxworks... the list goes on and on! So, you have transferred the game folder of your game on your phone using USB file transfer or by copyin...

If you use Nextcloud with Thunderbird, you might have noticed that Thunderbird version 102 is currently incompatible with the add-ons Provider for CalDAV & CardDAV and TbSync . But if you are only syncing your Nextcloud calendars with Thunderbird, you are in luck: you no longer need these two add-ons and can just remove them. Thunderbird now directly supports CalDAV calendars. Your calendars should work like usual. As I only synchronize the calendars I am unsure about contact list (CardDAV) synchronization. For that you might need to wait for add-on updates. At the time of writing, the official Nextcloud manual wasn't updated to reflect this change, and still listed the two add-ons as required .