LSC Computing
Frequently Asked Questions
Why have my GNOME terminals stopped responding?
If you have large or infinite scrollback enabled in GNOME-Terminal (and perhaps other terminal emulators),
then this data may fill up the /tmp partition and cause anything trying to write there
to stop responding. To check whether this is the problem, run df -h /tmp and see whether this
disk has no space left. If so, try closing some terminals, especially ones that have been outputting a lot of
data to screen.
To avoid this problem, turn off infinite scrollback (Edit -> Profile Preferences -> Scrolling). There is no obvious other fix. The data must be kept somewhere, and if it's filling up /tmp it's probably several GB in size, so is too large for memory anyway.
Why doesn't the sound volume-slider work?
Due to a confluence of various bugs with sound-related software, the volume slider
under GNOME does not work. You will need to run gnome-alsamixer in order
to adjust the volume for your headphones.
How can I mount USB-sticks / external HDDs?
If you are using GNOME or KDE as your desktop manager, then any USB stick or external HDD you plug
in should be mounted automatically under /media. In any other desktop, you can use pmount
to mount the drive manually. For example:
pmount /dev/sdc1
where /dev/sdc1 is the device partition you want to mount. This can usually be determined
by running
$ dmesg | tail ... [167984.595274] sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0 [167984.595323] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page found [167984.595326] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through ...
just after you have attached the new drive, and where the device name is sdc in this example. In order to unmount the drive again, use
pumount /dev/sdc1