Thinking and wondering out loud...

[DoYouKubuntu]

Agree. USB thumb drives don't need formatting - normally. With exfat used on the larger thumb drives, the only thing necessary in Linux is the presence of the exfat utils and exfat fuse packages.

So WTF happened with mine?! I'm talking about the two, 1TB thumb drives I bought recently. During my 8 million reinstalls of 20.04, at one point they unequivocally respected case. And then they didn't. That's how the whole formatting journey started, i.e., thinking they needed to be ext4 in order to work right...even though they DID work right at one point along the way.

And now I'm stuck with two brand-new drives that don't work, period. *

Just to be clear for anyone who hasn't read my thousand posts about it, I successfully formatted them as ext4 and gave each one the label I wanted, then that was it. From that point on they were not usable. They can't be mounted and they can't be used. They're recognized by Device Notifier but they're not usable. They're correctly recognized [in gParted and KDE Partition Manager] as 1TB ext4 drives.

* Note that Amazon has already refunded me for both drives, so they're really not my problem any more. Now I need suggestions for replacements that will unquestionably work by simply plugging them in, AND they'll respect case.

[jglen490]

Agree. USB thumb drives don't need formatting - normally. With exfat used on the larger thumb drives, the only thing necessary in Linux is the presence of the exfat utils and exfat fuse packages. They are installable, and may simply be a part of recent distros - either way it's not a big problem. I just checked and they are both in the repos, at least with 20.04.

[claydoh]

USB sticks have always come with a FAT type of file system so they normally don't need to be formatted. Which is why you have never had to format them.

Case sensitivity I dunno. FAT has always been case-insensitive afaik. But it is case-preserving.

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[DoYouKubuntu]

I don't remember seeing that response, @jglen490, so I'll be sure to check it out. Thanks.

The thing that's perplexed me from the get-go is that I simply don't recall ever having to format a USB drive. Since I only use *nix, and have since 1985, sharing files with other systems is not and has not ever been a concern. As far as I recall, each USB drive I used in the past, whether an external hard drive or a thumb drive, I simply stuck in to a USB port on a computer and began using it. Is it possible that I've FORGOTTEN formatting them? I don't like to use this as an excuse, and I definitely don't want anyone's pity, but I've had two health issues that could--and did, initially--affect my memory: a brain tumor and its removal via middle fossa craniotomy, then a few years later, near-fatal sepsis that kept me in the hospital for six months, with multi-organ failure. My brain is an organ! It was affected.

But the fog has been gradually lifting. When I bought two new Transcend drives a few months ago, to replace the two still-working ones, I plugged them in to my old System76 laptop, running 19.10, and started copying files. I can post a screenshot of files on them to show that they definitely respect case. I did not format them. The only thing I did was delete their directories containing window$ and Mac utilities.

[jglen490]

I responded in your thumb drive thread about my backup routine. Since my backups are never shared with anything but Linux systems, the drives are formatted as ext4 and are NOT bootable. I do have small (2 GB - 8GB) thumb drives that are formatted as fat32 that has whatever install is current on my main PC, and for a variety of others as potential use on my playground laptop. The biggest thumb drives I have are a couple of 120GB units. One is ext4 for use with my Raspberry Pi, and the other is exfat because on occasion I'll create specific files that I need to share with others.

Everything is targeted to specific end use cases.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Now that I've figured out the source of that awful connectivity problem, and fixed it, I'm really happy with my new laptop and 20.04. There are still a few things I need to sort out, but overall I'm just very pleased. It never ceases to amaze me how the development folks can crank out such a beautiful, stable, highly customizable product!

For fun, I used to try other distros from time to time, generally when I bought a new computer, just to see what else was out there now and what they looked like and so on, but since its inception Kubuntu has been my default distro. I never kept other distros going more than a few hours, as by then I had seen enough to know that they didn't offer anything Kubuntu didn't. Now that I'm not interested in experimenting, it's nice to have a reliable distro to fall back on.

I know I've done a LOT of griping recently, but I hope you're aware I wasn't complaining about Kubuntu--I was pretty sure all along that user error, as in *me*, was the source of my problems. For the most part, that turned out to be true, although some of it, like the static IP address settings that caused the connectivity problem, I couldn't have known about. If I had, I wouldn't have done them, you know? But now I've added that issue and its solution to my personal knowledge base, so it's all good.

If I can make use of my USB ports for backups, everything will be great! I've gotten a refund for the two 1TB thumb drives that didn't work out, but I haven't yet ordered replacements. I want to take my time and choose carefully. If you have a personal recommendation for replacements, please let me know. I'd prefer 1TB, but will certainly consider smaller capacities--just not TOO much smaller! I can't use something tiny, like 32 or 64GB. Realistically, I'd say 500GB would be about the smallest that would work for me. Keep in mind that case-sensitivity is a big requirement.

So that's my $0.02 worth! I've loved Kubuntu since its first release and will continue loving it, I'm sure.

[DoYouKubuntu]

UPDATE: For the source of the Internet connectivity problem, see this post.

==========================

Yeah, KDEC is a sometimes it does and sometimes not kinda thing for me. So I mostly just unmount the SD card on the tablet, pull it out, attach it to a hub, move the files I want, and then move the SD card back to the tablet. It's easy, and takes less time to troubleshoot.

That's way too labor-intensive for someone who's gotten really lazy, like me! I just use my file manager, MiXplorer Silver, on my Android devices to copy/move/delete/transfer files from/to my computers. This screenshot shows three of the computers it's connected to:



I have full access to all the computers' hard drives, including external, from my Android devices, and can copy or move files/directories from or to the computers/devices at will.

***************

Unrelated, I was about to post a "hallelujah!" thread. I was sooooooo happy to have my new laptop looking the way I want; note its pretty scrollbars, icon theme, and system tray icons:



And I got Samba up and running.

EDIT: Never mind what was here before! Everything's looking great now.

[jglen490]

Yeah, KDEC is a sometimes it does and sometimes not kinda thing for me. So I mostly just unmount the SD card on the tablet, pull it out, attach it to a hub, move the files I want, and then move the SD card back to the tablet. It's easy, and takes less time to troubleshoot.

Like I said, sometimes ...

[DoYouKubuntu]

Yes, I do love KDE Connect!

It works like a charm on my new laptop, where it was installed by default when I installed Kubuntu; on my old laptop, it was kind of touch-and-go as far as its reliability. Oddly, though, one thing that worked without issue on the old one was sharing clipboard contents. On the new laptop, that's not working...and with the PLETHORA of other issues, I haven't even begun to think about why not! All in due time. But, yes, its features are really cool and it's nice to have.

[GreyGeek]

Don't you just love KDEConnect!
I get my Samsung text messaged displayed on my plasma desktop screen as a popups and I can respond to them from KDEConnect. The message I send is appended to the list on my phone.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Here's one for the books. Remember how I said in my OP that I thought user error could be responsible for some of my problems? Yep!

I was just playing around with my system tray icons [that's covered elsewhere], and as I hovered over the tray icon for KDE Connect, something jumped out at me. KDEC was suppressing a display function, I think it said screensaver [which I don't use], but anyway I went to KDEC's settings [on the computer] and unchecked 'inhibit screensaver.' Then I went to System Settings and found that--once again--its controls for things like 'dim screen' were working! Okay...

I distinctly remember [as noted above] that I hadn't adjusted anything but the minutes to wait for the screen to shut off, that night when this 'problem' came up. But, whatever! It's fixed now.

[dequire]

And whatever happened to Unity? Wasn't GNOME replaced with Unity at some point as Ubuntu's DE? I don't stay up on such stuff as it generally doesn't apply to me, but I'm wondering if user-revolt caused the dumping of Unity in favor of old standby, GNOME.

It's still around
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubunt...ix-20-04/15968
https://ubuntuunity.org/

[DoYouKubuntu]

At this point I'm suspecting that your machine was put together early Monday morning or late Friday and it is a lemon.

Ha ha! That would explain a lot!

My first test would be to boot from a confirmed good USB stick and run your machine in the Live mode for the day, doing everything you'd normally do (if possible) including sleeping the display a/o the machine, etc. If it works OK from the USB stick then it may not be a hardware problem. Granted, there are some things you can't test running a USB stick (especially the display driver) but the Live version crashes as well then

Right now--knock on wood--everything's going really well.

I have not yet installed Samba, as I got sidetracked doing other things; I now have root logins enabled, and the login screen isn't pre-filled with any user's name. I've also confirmed that despite System Settings not responding to things like adjusting the screen's brightness, hardware works, so I can use the [F8] and [F9] function keys to adjust that. I'm slowly adding things in, making sure I have current backups before making any changes, and it's slowly but surely getting to where I want it.

Now, don't anyone hold me to this! I'm not ready to proclaim success, just that things are going very smoothly right now, and this one-at-a-time method of adding/tweaking things seems to be working. Sure, it's a bit cumbersome, but it beats the hell out of bricking the laptop and having to start over again!

https://support.system76.com/articles/hardware-failure/

I've bookmarked it...just in case...

[GreyGeek]

I found a site that tracked the freezing issue in Ubuntu from 18.04 to 20.04 Here are the "solutions" posted. They worked for some and not for others.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...x/+bug/1798961

#42

Had same frozen display problem with Ubuntu, most times coincident with a very busy video adapter (MVP, Gimp, GMaps..)
Hardware: Laptop Acer Aspire 5735Z
Ubuntu 18.10
Linux 4.18.0-13-generic

Workaround:
sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf
...add
Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Graphics"
Driver "intel"
Option "AccelMethod" "sna"
Option "TearFree" "true"
Option "DRI" "3"
EndSection

Result: Still ok after several hours and tasks.

#58

I've had these freeze issues for a while, and I've been following this thread for a while (comment #42 helped, though I still have occasional freezes).

Googled "Fedora random freeze" today and found this: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Commo..._hang_randomly

Apparently an issue in Ubuntu also: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...82#post1020982

And the timing of these bugreports/comments coincides with when these freezes started affecting me...

Long story short, we can try adding `ahci.mobile_lpm_policy=1` or `ahci.mobile_lpm_policy=0` to the kernel options in grub. Supposedly confirmed to help Lenovo G50-80, X250 and T450s. We have a G40-80 and T470s affected on this thread, and mine's a Lenovo G500s (similar to G50-80). Maybe it'll help? (praying that it helps)

It's possible that these freezes have multiple causes, and won't be completely fixed even if the workaround helps at all.

#77

I also experienced this problem, but after increasing swap memory from 2GB to 8GB, I didn't reproduce the issue for 1 month straight.

#83

UPDATE: freezes stopped occuring since I uninstalled xserver-xorg-video-intel.

[GreyGeek]

At this point I'm suspecting that your machine was put together early Monday morning or late Friday and it is a lemon.

My first test would be to boot from a confirmed good USB stick and run your machine in the Live mode for the day, doing everything you'd normally do (if possible) including sleeping the display a/o the machine, etc. If it works OK from the USB stick then it may not be a hardware problem. Granted, there are some things you can't test running a USB stick (especially the display driver) but the Live version crashes as well then ...

https://support.system76.com/articles/hardware-failure/