Since day one I'm using Linux, I've always maintained a list of things that I wanted to fix, find a solution for or just wanted to know. I've been looking for solutions to every single problem on this list at some point or another to no avail, so I'm asking here now.

The list is in no particular order and asks questions about various subjects. It's also quite long, but don't be afraid to just pick an item and provide an answer. Any help is greatly appreciated!


1. Audio volume range:
It's never enough. I usually adjust my volume with the mixer and leave my amp at a fixed setting. If I adjust the amp to be more quiet and leave it at that, I can adjust the lower volumes properly, but it doesn't get loud enough when I want it to be loud. Setting it louder: vice versa.
Is there a way to increase the range of the volume mixer? It would suffice if I could set the lower volumes with a finer grain (like 0.1%)

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3. I often start extra X sessions for games and such. Is there a way to stop X from automatically switching to the newly opened vt? When I start an app on vt8 from vt7, it should stay on vt7 until I switch it myself. For the record, I use this command to start the additional X session:
-novtswitch is supposed to do this, but it doesn't work. It still automatically switches to the new vt. The only difference is that it won'T switch back on its own.

4. I always use monochrome fonts because I like the aliased look. Since I reinstalled Gentoo (went from x86 to amd64), non-GTK app's fonts went from OK to ugly. GTK apps look fine since I manually specified a font that looks good in monochrome for them in Gnome. How do I fix/change the fonts in the other apps?

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7. When I've got a VMware machine running (VMware Server), the whole X server crashes when I try to change the vt. Is there anything known about a bug like this?

8. I'd like the Gnome filepicker to remember its last position and not ALWAYS start inside my home folder. This one really keeps getting on my nerves.

9. When I shutdown the system from the Gnome menu, I only get the message "System shutting down, please wait", but it's not showing which services stop and if there's any problems stopping them. Is it possible to fix that?

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11. I'm looking for an image to some sort of Mini-Linux that can be booted like memtest86 from Grub. It should have disk and filesystem drivers and some basic software to work with filesystem and files to fix stuff once I managed to make my Gentoo unbootable again. Maybe I can tell grub to boot an Live-CD iso image, would that work?

12. Looking at this image, I can see a load spike every 29 minutes or so (4AM to 11AM). It's not cron. What could it be?

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14. On my emu10k1 Alsa mixer, when I change the PCM recording level, it also changes my PCM playback level. wtf?

15. Is it possible to increase the console scrollback buffer when using uvesafb? I already have fbcon=scrollback:128K in my kernel line, but it's not enough by orders of mangitude

16. When I open a movie in Gnome (using gmplayer) it sometimes opens 2 mplayer instances (no, I didn't click too often). I never understood why or how to fix it...

17. Since a Gnome update about half a year ago, Gnome beeps the pcspeaker on almost every occasion. Like going back using backspace or deleting something using del in Nautilus Or when I try to erase text in gedit using backspace and there's nothing left to erase. It's driving me nuts! I know that I can disable the System beep under Sound Preferences in Gnome, but that also disables it for things where I want it, like IRC or Thunderbird.

18. Gnome dies when it tries to access a Samba share it cannot access. It's freezing the window I just worked it and then, after several minutes, finally decides to time out. Can I change the timeout to something sane, like 15 secs?

19. It appears the more RAM you have, the more RAM apps will use. Especially Gnome-panel seems to suck up memory like nothing else. 35MB for a fricking panel, plus several MBs per applet. That's ridiculous! Also, after being logged in for a day, other apps start using lots of RAM too. Audacious climbs to about 30MB, Firefox (3.x) to 500MB, X uses almost 200MB, Pidgin uses 20MB, Thunderbird 125MB, etc. These apps are supposed to be small! Yes, these measurements are correct. I'm not looking at virtual mem, but at resident. No, I'm not using -O3 or such. I'm not saying Windoze handles memory better, but Windows apps generally seem to consume far less memory.
Additionally, I don't understand how user memory is calculated. Right now it says I'm using 1.6GB -user- memory, but all processes combined only amount to about half of that. Where does the other half come from? Remember, I'm talking about user memory, so it can't be buffers or cache

20. I'm living in Germany, where a 24h time format is used. However, I prefer an fully English system. Well, apps like Thunderbird or gnome-system-monitor still display the old AM/PM times and dates, which is extremely annoying. I want to have my cake and eat it too But how? [solved]

21. Is it possible to change the order in which gnome-multiload-applet displays its graphs?

22. Is there a good replacement for file-roller under Gnome?

23. I've always wanted Gnome setting dialogs to have apply, cancel and undo buttons instead of applying changes immediately...

24. Bash-completion for chown seems to be broken. Instead of user:group I get: Huh?

25. I want to change the speed (number of lines scrolled) of my mousewheel in Gnome. People have been asking this all the time, but I never saw a definite answer to that.

26. Is there a Firefox extension that when Ff asks me to download something, allows me to actually see the link to what I'm about to download?


That's it for now
Thanks in advance!

1. Try adjusting both the PCM and Master channels in the mixer.

8. Not exactly the answer you're looking for, but might be useful: you can drag folders to the pane on the side of the file picker for quickly changing to them.

12. Check your crontabs, see if there is a correlation. If not you can set up a sciprt to do some logging which you can check later.

17. There are a couple of ways to turn off the system beep. My favourite is to remove the pcspkr kernel module so nothing can use it :-) You can create a file /etc/modprobe.d/my_blacklist, containing:
And it will not load at the next boot. You can also do this as root to remove it from a running system without needing to reboot:There's probably a better way to do it, but this way works.

19. Memory usage is complicated, and ps is not a good tool to use. See this link for a good description of how to do better analysis.

20. I don't understand - which one do you want, and which one do you have. Is it the same for all apps, or is the problem that yo are getting a mixture of formats in different apps?

26. Sounds like a nice idea. I'd like to have that too.


As for all those gnome problems: use fluxbox

First off: Thanks for taking your time to answer!


Many programs only allow for one channel to be adjusted. Good idea, but not possible

Gonna try that.

As I said already, it's not crontab. A script you say? Mhh, guess I could log all processes running. Gonna try that

No, I need the beep on other occasions. I mustn't completely disable it.

The command provided by that site actually reports even more mem usage for single processes than htop.
Again, as of right now, the total user memory usage of my system is reported to be about twice the usage of all processes combined, regardless if I exclude shared libs or not, and regardless if I measure it using htop or pmap -d like from that site you gave me.
This simply can't be right can't.


All apps are English, which is a good thing. Thunderbird uses AM/PM tho, which it should not.
Most apps allow me to change the time format, so this is no issue. Only for the remaining few, like Tbird, the issue remains.

Yah, especially since I often download using MLdonkey (to use its ability to combine different networks and servers to download a single file)


Meh. Problem is, I'm used to Gnome. There's stuff like file-browser-applet, sensors-applet or multiload-applet that I do not want to get rid of.

Is that figure including IO buffers? Linux aggressively allocates memory for IO buffering, preferring to do that that leave it "free".

Check the locale settings by opening a terminal and typing "locale". You can over-ride just the time format by setting LC_TIME in your .profile (you will have to re-start your X-session for this to affect programs started from the Gnome menus).

For example, in your .profile, add the line:
Which will tell locale-aware apps to use the German style for times. If thunderebird is locale aware, that should do it. You can test it from the terminal without having to re-start you X session by closing thunderbird, and then starting it from the terminal like this:
(I assume the thunderbird executable is "thunderbird" on your system. Change it if necessary).

Nope. It's not buffers/cache. It's "user memory". Disk cache is the rest of my 6GB RAM
You might say I needn't worry about memory usage if I have 6GB. But if you ask me, there's something fundamentally wrong, and it's going to get worse once apps become even bigger.


Awesome! I set LC_TIME to de_DE (only de wouldn't work). Thunderbird uses 24h format now. Works like a charm, Thank you!

Like I said before, use fluxbox. Really light weight. Make your choice - gnome's bells and whistles, or something tighter, like fluxbox. You have to do a cost/benefit analysis for yourself.



W00t!

The heavy hitters are Thunderbird/Firefox, which I would use anyway. A lighter desktop would make a difference of maybe 200MB. I don't really care about those to be honest
It's a fundamental problem, but I just can't figure it out....