terriko

Playing with docker and the mailman bundler today in an attempt to get some images running, and I hit a point where I got this:

root@fd97a058ea83:~/mailman-bundler# apt-get install python3-dev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
python3-dev : Depends: libpython3-dev (= 3.4.0-0ubuntu2) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: python3.4-dev (>= 3.4.0-0~) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

It was very non-obvious to me what was going on and google wasn't super helpful, so I'm posting in case someone else searches for the same "but it is not going to be installed" installed error message.

Turns out, what happened is that I needed to run apt-get update, and now it's happy.

Well, at least relative to that... buildout in mailman-bundler is complaining about numpy so I've still got some work to do!

This is more a note to self than anything else, but who knows, maybe someone reading is having exactly the same problem as me?

The "new" laptop has an overly sensitive touchpad, in that it seemed to be clicking at times when I didn't want it to click. While quite a few people handle this by disabling the touchpad or disabling tap-to-click, I knew from experience with my last linux laptop that this is a solvable problem under linux at least.

There's a *lot* of ways to control mouse settings, but here's the one that worked for me. In short:

xinput list
to find my touchpad device, which turned out to be id=12

xinput list-props 12 |grep -i finger
to give me a list of relevant entries

xinput set-prop 12 "Synaptics Finger" 25, 32, 256

to set it to something that seems better behaved.
According to the link above: "By increasing the second parameter, you require more finger pressure for the trackpad to respond. The first parameter controls release pressure, the third is to detect a button press (I think)."

and that seemed to match up. In my case, I needed to up the second number. While I was in there, I tweaked the two-finger settings so it'd be easier to "right click" with two fingers.

Lest it's useful to me later, here's my current settings:

terri@djpwn3:~$ xinput list-props 12 |grep -i finger
	Synaptics Finger (261):	25, 32, 256
	Synaptics Two-Finger Pressure (268):	256
	Synaptics Two-Finger Width (269):	1
	Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling (272):	1, 1

My boss got a huge beautiful new monitor, so I got her old apple display to use as a second monitor today. However, it wasn't entirely intuitive to set up dual monitors on my Ubuntu machine at work: The Apple monitor would turn on for a second and then turn off, which apparently is what they do if they have no signal, but I didn't know that at first. All the instructions said to go to the ubuntu display settings and tell it to autodetect, but that didn't work because it didn't notice the other monitor. So then I went to xorg.conf, which apparently by default is disturbingly short, but I wasn't too sure what to put in. Thankfully, this post came to the rescue. In short, here's what I did:

Run nvidia-settings.
Under "X Server Display Configuration" I could see that my second monitor was there but unused, so I clicked on it to enable it and modified the settings to suit.
I had already backed up my xorg.conf so I clicked on "Save to X Configuration file." It tossed an error about not being able to parse xorg.confg, but clicking through gave me a "Save X Configuration dialog" where I could click "Show preview" and copy those settings to my xorg.conf
Restarted X11 (actually, I rebooted 'cause I was lazy and wanted to knit a row of my latest project) and poof, it works!

So now that it works, I've also customized it to match the rest of my office with the help of some window cling stickers I had on hand:

I am either terrible at being an adult or awesome at it.

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Entries tagged with linux

"but it is not going to be installed"

My oversensitive touchpad

I have a second monitor at work

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May 2025

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