[DC LoCo] On vacation... Hoping for a "substitute teacher / troubleshooter"

[Kevin Cole]

Hi all,

I'm *trying* to be on vacation, and almost succeeding. ;-)

However, I do occasionally offer tech support to folks I worked with
at the Cleveland Park Library.  In particular, I've recently walked
Jerry Stilkind through an upgrade from Lucid to Natty (with the
requisite layover in Maverick).   Since I won't be around for a bit,
I've subscribed him to this list, in the hopes that folks can help him
if he gets stuck.  And by help, I mean probably more than instruction
via e-mail.  He's a USER, not a developer. Be gentle.

My DSL at home is up-again-down-again, and I think it's finally time
to hang up on Speakeasy, having grown tired of the
Speakeasy-blames-Covad-blames-Verizon-blames-Covad-blames-Speakeasy-blames-"the
customer's 'old' modem" cycle. (The modem is, as I recall, a
replacement they sent me two years ago.) So, I'm not sitting in front
of an Ubuntu machine at the moment.  A couple of questions that
someone could perhaps help Jerry with:

1) He's got a duplicate entry for an external hard drive in his Gnome
panel Places menu.  Choosing one of the two yields an "already
mounted" message.  The other works fine.  How should he remove the
errant copy?  With patience, you can probably walk him through that
problem over the phone.

2) Simple Backup (sbackup)... not simple enough.  According to Jerry,
it now is leaving corrupt files around.  Also, there seems to be, at
least occasionally, an issue with permissions where it backs up
something he has ownership of, but then tells him he can't look at it.
 It backs up to the external hard drive (connected via USB cable). Are
there either (a) ways to tame it or (b) "simpler" backups?  I didn't
want to get into constructing a cron / rsync script, particularly
since it's not really a user-friendly solution, but if someone else
knows of a good package or has the savvy to construct a user-friendly
system and will make a house call, that would work.  DON'T try to send
a solution via e-mail as you'll just end up frustrating both yourself
and Jerry.  I'd also say that even over the phone, you're asking for a
heap of trouble.

3) If you hear of a better solution to the monitor not waking problem,
pass that on.  (I've given him both Mackenzie's solution and mine,
both of which seem like "treatment of a symptom" rather than "cure for
a diagnosed bug".)

Thanks!