Ubuntu – I Recently Installed Ubuntu Desktop GUI Over My Ubuntu Server Install and I Broke Some Bash Commands

bashserver

I have been running a virtualbox of Ubuntu Server for web development and have been getting along quite nicely. I decided to install Ubuntu Desktop via "sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop" so I can use Sublime Text until I get better with Vim. I have been SSH into my VM from PuTTY, and had my .bashrc set up how I liked it. Now that I have the GUI installed though, many bash commands aren't working and my shell settings are different.

For example, 'ls' now gives me this error:

ls: cannot access .color=auto: No such file or directory

I have verified that I am using /bin/bash via:

echo $SHELL

I believe it has something to do with using a non-login version of bash vs a login version over SSH, but I have tried sourcing the .bashrc and .profile to no avail. What am I doing wrong?

Best Answer

This smells like a problem with your aliases. You probably have something like

alias ls="ls -h .color=auto"

This is what I have:

alias ls='ls --color=auto'

After changing you need to reload the desktop!

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to get long command lines to wrap to the next line

Make sure all non-printable bytes in your PS1 are contained within \[ \]. Otherwise, bash will count them in the length of the prompt. It uses the length of the prompt to determine when to wrap the line.

For example, here bash counts the prompt as 19 columns wide, while the prompt displayed by the terminal is only 10 columns wide (My prompt written in cyan, and > written in default color):

PS1='\e[36mMy prompt\e[0m>'         # bash count: 19, actual: 10

while here it only counts the prompt as 10 columns wide because it ignores the bytes between the special \[ and \] escapes:

PS1='\[\e[36m\]My prompt\[\e[0m\]>' # bash count: 10, actual: 10

For good practice though, use tput to generate the terminal escapes rather than hard coding them:

cyan=$(tput setaf 6) # \e[36m
reset=$(tput sgr0)   # \e[0m
PS1='\[$cyan\]My prompt\[$reset\]>'

See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/053, and also http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/scripting/terminalcodes for more on tput.

Ubuntu – GDM causes freeze on a remote login server. (over 5,000 users)

Wow thats a new one on me. I'm not really sure that the GUI actually gets you anything that you can't get with a text mode login (contrary to popular belief, you don't need to learn vi. Nano is perfectly easy to use). So, I'd suggest removing the GUI from a server as a simple fix. However this presents an interesting problem none-the-less.

1) You should report this as a bug in gdm. Its an edge-case, but one that GDM should handle well. I can imagine a university shared workstation where a system has 10,000 possible users.. gdm should just not display a chooser. Run 'ubuntu-bug gdm' to open the bug report.

2) Edit /etc/gdm/gdm.schemas and change

<schema>
  <key>greeter/IncludeAll</key>
  <signature>b</signature>
  <default>true</default>
</schema>

<schema>
  <key>greeter/IncludeAll</key>
  <signature>b</signature>
  <default>false</default>
</schema>

And then if you still want a chooser for your local users

<schema>
  <key>greeter/Include</key>
  <signature>s</signature>
  <default></default>
</schema>

<schema>
  <key>greeter/Include</key>
  <signature>s</signature>
  <default>user1,user2,user3</default>
</schema>

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – How to get long command lines to wrap to the next line

Ubuntu – GDM causes freeze on a remote login server. (over 5,000 users)

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