bkil vs. programming

Unity is full of bugs.We all know it. Usually the window manager fails and decorations are gone. Sometimes all windows are stacked on top of each other at a corner. It's so bad that I had to write a script for killing and restarting the effected processes easily from a shell to resume working. All of this usually occurs when doing twisted deeds like opening a web page, however it can sometimes be triggered by toggling fullscreen or starting an application. It is always unexpected and unpredictable. If you know what to do, you don't loose any work and you don't even need to close any windows. So it's only a cosmetic issue at this level, but still not very professional. Interestingly, I have encountered this mostly in 2012-2014, and they have much reduced the occurrence rate from about 2015. Nonetheless, I don't use Unity on any of my new installs since about 2013 because of this. If you are fortunate enough to never have used this wonderful peace of engineering, ...

A friend called for help when one of his computers failed a distribution upgrade. The upgrade was started from 12.04 LTS via the GUI. I'm not sure which version he had previously, but the standard update procedure stopped midway. The upgrade could not be resumed, so manual intervention was needed. I'm not sure whether the issue was caused by a bit error in memory, an out of space issue or by something else. Unfortunately, I don't have the error messages at hand. The solution boiled down to doing the following tedious steps: apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade do-release-upgrade dpkg --configure -a apt-get -f install mcedit /var/lib/dpkg/status # delete section which is complained about mktexlsr # note down errors updmap-sys --synthwithtrees # note down errors mcedit /etc/texmf/... # remove invalid map file lines updmap-sys apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

It works out of the box with a plain wvdial after a small adjustment (need to erase the +FCLASS=0 part). It is detected as the following device (after the automatic mode switch): ID 12d1:1506 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E398 LTE/UMTS/GSM Modem/Networkcard For the record, I paste the wvdial.conf configured for T-Mobile in Hungary: [Dialer Defaults] Init1 = ATZ Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0 Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet" Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0 Username = wap Password = wap Modem Type = Analog Modem Baud = 9600 New PPPD = yes ISDN = 0 Phone = *99# Stupid Mode = 1 Most of the settings are not crucial, but some of them depend on your carrier, like "Init3", "Username" and "Password", while "Modem" depends on your device.