Ubuntu Oddities, pt. I

Sharing fails
Context-clicked a folder and selected to share it. Said I needed to install a Windows networking service. I said yes, but I had synaptic open so it failed. Closed synaptic and tried again; but after clicking install service nothing happened, and then it said the session needed to be restarted. Doing so yielded nothing though, sharing still doesn’t work and trying to enable it yields the same result. Rebooting doesn’t help.

Can’t activate Nvidia drivers
Activating my wifi drivers worked fine, but when I click Activate on the nvidia drivers, 173 or 177, nothing happens. (A progress bar appears at 0%, spins indeterminately, and then disappears, with the state of the driver still as “unactivated”).

SOLVED: Trying to switch to fancy desktop effects bizarrely installs the driver without a hitch, and without showing that strange driver preference pane. It just installs almost silently.

Nerdtalk
Functionality needs to be installed through the Synaptics package manager. However, all packages have short, cryptic and abbreviated names that doesn’t say what the package does. That’s not very friendly…

Tiresome movie dialogs
Trying to play a mkv file yields a million dialog boxes with menacing icons that warn you about missing codecs, packs, and proprietarity. Clicking blindly on accept gets you through it, but it’s still pretty nasty.

Enjoy the silence
There’s no sound. Trying to change sound device yields the horrible assertion that “audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink profile=music: Could not open audio device for playback”. What does that even mean?

SOLVED: The solution is of course to add an obscure line to an obscure file, as usual in Linux.

Wobbly priorities
Ubuntu has wobbly windows – but, unless it’s a configuration option somewhere, not live resize of windows. Priorities, anyone? Even Windows has had live resize for the longest time.