VMware and USB audio broken in 17.1

[Isaiah_Sellassie]

Thank you, Wolfman! I appreciate your time and attention. Yes, Vbox is sufficient for my current purposes.

Not having my USB audio device is a deal breaker. If 18.04 does not fix that I will definitely return to Windows. Linux on the file server, where all data is stored and backed up to the cloud. And, Windows on the desktops.

[wolfman]

Hi @Isaiah_Sellassie,

do you happen to have an AMD CPU?, I ask because the link below states about installing the amd64microcode package in Ubuntu?.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/971938/no-usb-digital-sound-on-17-10-but-win-10-sound-is-ok?utm_medium=organic&utm_source=google_rich_qa&utm_campaign=google_rich_qa

I am not sure if this is for both 32 and 64 bit versions of Ubuntu though?. Open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + t) and paste the following command and then restart your system. ONLY INSTALL IF YOU HAVE A 64 BIT VERSION IF AT ALL UNSURE, DON’T DO IT!:

sudo apt install amd64microcode

There is also the Intel package should you have an Intel CPU which works with both 32 and 64 bit versions if you happen to have one of those!:

sudo apt install intel-microcode

I hope it helps!.

[Isaiah_Sellassie]

Thanks Wolfman! Here is the output

“intel-microcode is already the newest version (3.20180312.0~ubuntu17.10.1).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 10 not upgraded.”

So, that’s not it in my case.

[wolfman]

Hi Isaiah,

I really have no idea for any further course of action, sorry!.

[Isaiah_Sellassie]

I appreciate your time and attention, Wolfman! You represent what is best about the Linux community. Thank you, again.

Cron is broken, VMware is broken, USB audio is broken. All were working fine in 16.04, so I am counting on 18.04 to fix these. Caja is fragile, and Samba shares cannot be mounted automatically—these I have to live with.

Do you know of an image viewer program with more features than EoM and Shotwell? I want to be able to sort files by height and width. Windows Explorer can do this.

[wolfman]

Hi Isaiah,

I don’t know of any app that would sort by size sorry!.

I can really only suggest you upgrade to 18.04, it is almost due for final release but you safely install it now, I have been using it for weeks and don’t have any problems with it!.

[Isaiah_Sellassie]

I am waiting on a replacement M.2 SSD to arrive from China, and then it’s 18.04, first testing on my secondary system, and then on the main workstation. In the old days we used to worry about Windows update breaking things, and now we worry about Linux update breaking things.

[wolfman]

You could try booting into an older kernel, it may be that the kernel updates have caused the problems?.

[Isaiah_Sellassie]

I should have tried that indeed. Here is what has happened in the meanwhile. My SSD arrived. I dd copied the MBR and then rsync copied all the folders other than home to the new drive. I switched the boot drive in BIOS hoping for the best, but nope—blinking cursor, no Grub.

Anyway, I plugged in my USB optical drive and fired up 17.1 Live thinking I might as well separate my root and home folders now since I have Aptik backup to restore my custom apps and settings. Well, 17.1 installation failed and it offered to send a bug report, but desktop was dead—no mouse or keyboard input did anything. But, before that it had warned me that if I continue with UEFI installation other OSes may become unbootable.

Sure enough, the working 17.1 on another drive did indeed become unbootable—it starts out fine, showing the logo and scrolling dots, and then drops to [initramfs] prompt, and blinking cursor. After a few minutes I hard rebooted out, and tried installing 17.1 without booting up Live. This time it crashed while installing ‘efi-grub-amd-64’ (? something like that) – my Thinkpad is an Intel, so not sure why it wanted to install that.

I gave up and decided to give Windows 10 a spin. It installed fine, and is running now. I will burn 18.04 to a disk and install it on a 16Gb embedded SSD which had been doing swap duty before, and use the 120Gb SSD as home. I suppose dual boot is the sensible option for me. I can eliminate use of the Windows VMs. There is only one program I really need, and I use it intensively when I do, i.e. no multi tasking. So, switching over to Windows for a couple of hours at a time, once or twice a week, until this project is done.

That’s the story. You’ve been just great, Wolfman, thanks again!

[wolfman]

Hi Isaiah,

as far as UEFI partitions go, see the partitioning guide and the part about UEFI at the bottom:

GParted partition guide for Linux and Windows users

Linux beginners should also look here: You can only partition on an unmounted drive using an installation disk of your Linux flavour with a partitioning tool included, use the Gparted tool in live mode, or you can download a copy of Gparted from the link below and create your own Gparted disk: http://gparted.org/download.php WARNING BEFORE YOU START TO PARTITION YOUR DRIVE: MAKE SURE YOU DEFRAGMENT YOUR WINDOWS DRIVE BEFORE YOU START RESIZING THE WINDOWS PARTITION AS IT MAY WELL LEAD …

Let me know if I can be of any more assistance.

[Isaiah_Sellassie]

I wish I had read that before I started an install of 16.04.4. I have aborted it now. Just so I understand it clearly — during partitioning I have to assign /boot/efi to the 100Mb FAT32 partition created by Windows 10? And, can I still install Grub to the MBR of the drive with Linux root? I would prefer to keep the 2 OS separate, i.e. switch boot drive by pressing F12 and choosing it during startup, rather than choosing OS from the Grub menu. Is that still possible?

Windows is on sdb, which is the current default boot drive. I want Linux on sdc and use sda as /home. What is the best, cleanest, safest way to dual boot with UEFI only?

Thanks again, man, you are priceless!

[wolfman]

Hi Isaiah,

resize one of your Linux partitions by a small amount (enough to accommodate the UEFI partition) and create a UEFI partition within that, it should help solve your problem?.

Use “Boot repair” to fix GRUB after you have created the partition!:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

You should also find Boot Repair in “Welcome”?, (on the Live CD at least!!).

[Isaiah_Sellassie]

That’s what I did. Install went smoothly. I am back up, and into my desktop, unchanged. I used Live to move my user folder to the proper location, using the -a option to keep file permissions intact. I have not rebooted after running Aptik restore. The Aptik backup was made from 17.04 or 17.1, not sure which. I hope nothing breaks now.

Thanks, Wolfman. Your support has been very, very helpful.

[Isaiah_Sellassie]

USB audio is back! I’m a happy camper again. But… no regular volume control in the system tray. When I launch PulseAudio Manager it shows empty fields, status “Failure: Connection refused”. So, Foobar2000 (in Wine) is playing music just fine, but no other apps have sound.

[Isaiah_Sellassie]

Ok, I’m in 18.04 now. My panels setup was not broken! Hurray!

1. But there is no Notification Area’. If I add it, nothing happens.
2. There is no sound. If I try to launch Pulse volume control it hangs with a spinning wheel.
3. Mate Tweak says Compiz is the window manager, but in fact it is not.
4. All my Desktop icons are gone. I can find them in Caja but they don’t show on the desktop.
5. Plex media server is broken. It was fine in 17.1

[wolfman]

Hi Isaiah,

read the update guide linked above about fixing broken packages, I will paste the command below for you which you should run, also change your software sources download location as this may also help solve any problems you have!.

Fixing Broken Packages:

There are often posts on the forum about “Broken Packages”, you can solve this problem by opening: Synaptic > Edit > Fix broken packages. (You may well already be in Synaptic when you see this message!)

You can also run a command to fix this; run this command in a terminal:

sudo dpkg --configure -a

The above command may not be necessary!.

sudo apt-get --fix-missing install

The above command downloads and installs any missing packages on your system.

sudo apt-get --fix-broken install

The above command downloads and installs any broken dependencies on your system.

See also:

Forcing an update:

The only difference about the force command is the “-f” at the end of the command which denotes the “force” part of the command. This will make sure that any missing dependencies get installed too!.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -f

I hope it helps.

Ideally you should close this thread as solved as you have now sorted your main problem and concentrate on the new problems in a new thread!.

[Isaiah_Sellassie]

Point taken, sir. I’ll start separate threads for each issue.

I fixed Pulse by deleting the old files in ~./pulse and ~./config/pulse. The Aptik restore of the home folder may have affected hardware compatibility, because the backup had been made from an older hardware that is now dead. I thought the home folder is completely hardware agnostic.

Thanks again!

[wolfman]

Alrighty then!.

Please mark the best answer as solving the issue so we can close this thread!.

[Isaiah_Sellassie]

How do I do that? Sorry for the dummy question.

[wolfman]

Click on the "Show more" button and click the green tick box! (I already marked it for you.