<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div><div>Thanks, Peter, </div><div>To answer as best I can what you have written: My Wifi is WPA2 security. What happened was that when I updated from 12.04 to 14.04, the system loaded the wrong drivers for the Broadcom wifi board and I had to reload the correct one. At this point, I discovered that the system would not give me access to enter the wifi password - anywhere in any part of the Applications menu. It appeared that the programming for this was either corrupt or absent. Despite my years of experience in searching on the Internet, I found no mention of this. Broadcom wifi boards are such a nuisance that I bought in a second-hand Intel equivalent and fitted that. I still couldn't get at the logon for wifi and continued to have to link via ethernet cable. </div>Eventually, I decided to "cut the Gordian knot". The wifi issue had only ever happened on 14.04 so I reloaded 12.04, which has been pretty consistent and was immediately able to access the wifi logon and use wifi again. </div>I then tried to update to 14.04 again and this is when I lost all access to voluntarily update the machine. It still pops up with the updater automatically. Presumably the interface is xfce, I don't do anything clever, as while I have immense experience as a user and occasional programmer from 1964 on, I'm still a newbie on Linux and making haste slowly. The previous time I loaded from this disc, I *did* have the Software Updater in the Applications menu under System! </div>Thanks for the terminal command - I'm newbie enough not to have known that before. </div>I have no idea what programs these updates are for. I haven't knowingly loaded either of the two you mention. Oddly the updates aren't greyed out, they simply won't allow me to select them and come in the middle of a list where every other update is ticked as selected. </div>I've used the terminal a fair bit, if by rote. I'm still trying to get my head round what all the commands mean and what they're actually doing. I can type them in with the best (aside from the odd finger trouble). Yet I've still to find where for example "apt-get" actually goes to look for the "apt". It's just assumed that I'd know - and I'm dopey enough not to. I was last in the depths of computer hardware/architecture and control systems in the early 1980s with the Acorn BBC B computer, when I used to write chips for my own amusement. Computer architecture has moved on vastly since then, while I've married and moved up to levels where my interactions with computers are strictly at the user level and the system design level, and even then a secondary part of my duties. This leaves me floundering a bit, as the assumption that someone with my background would even have had *time* to keep up with the massive architectural changes in computers, is non-valid - at least in my case. Hence my attempts to understand what is going on and the strange blend of newbie and experience. Until I started with Xubuntu this year my only experience with any Unix system was in 1981 with something called Xenix, all of which I have long forgotten (except the name). </div>David </div><div class="gmail_extra"> <div class="gmail_quote">On 4 December 2014 at 22:03, Peter Flynn <<a href="mailto:peter@silmaril.ie" target="_blank">peter@silmaril.ie</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On 12/04/2014 07:45 PM, David Walland wrote: > I thought I'd sent this to the List but it doesn't seem to have got > through. It got distributed this time anyway. > I've tried to Google but can get no meaningful answers. Google can be useful, but phrasing the query takes practice and foreknowledge, as there are established ways of referring to things that need to be used (as you rightly note at the end). > I'm running an old Dell Latitude D620 Laptop with Xubuntu 64 bit (Core > Duo cpu). Interesting. I'm running a D810 and a D610 with 14.04 and Enlightenment. > I've been moving between 12.04 and 14.04 as I originally > found 14.04 stopped me from accessing my WiFi as it wouldn't let me get > to where I could put in my WiFi system password. What security is the network using? Did you mean: a. it found your network but didn't prompt for the password OR b. it prompted you for (eg) username, but the password was invisible > This has now resolved itself. Do you know if you did something that helped it to resolve? > Now it's doing (14.04) something similar with Update. This works > happily automatically Do you mean it pops up "Software Updater" from time to time by itself? I just logged out of e17 and into xfce, and sure enough, there was a taskbar item for Software Updater. > but my access to run it as and when *I* want has > magically disappeared from everywhere on the Applications Menu. It > *was* always on the "Systems" sub-menu. Any idea how I can get this back? My System menu *does* have an entry for Software Updater. Are you using xfce or some other interface? > Secondly, when it does come up for automatic Updating, two items are > totally inaccessible to me on the list but always present. Can anyone > explain why or how to get them to be available for updating? Can you expand on "inaccessible"? Do you mean greyed-out? > "Command-line driven interactive plotting program. No-X package" > and > "Command-line driven interactive plotting program. X package". You don't say what the names of the programs are; I'm guessing these are gnuplot-nox and gnuplot-x11. > If the update is needed surely it should be runnable, if it isn't why is > it there? One way to resolve these questions is to run the update from the command line. That way you remove the graphical layer between you and the program. Open a Terminal window and type sudo apt-get upgrade It will ask for your password: type it in (it will not show anything) and press Enter. This should list the pending updates: examine them for these two oddities. Some updates get held back (for a variety of reasons), and apt-get should list these separately. You can use Y or N to do the suggested upgrade or not. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade should upgrade everything, held over or not. ///Peter -- xubuntu-users mailing list <a href="mailto:xubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com">xubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/xubuntu-users" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/xubuntu-users</a> </blockquote></div> </div>