Issues Arising in Tech Support

Issues Arising in Tech Support

"My computer keeps shutting down"

This comes up a lot and we are very rarely able to reproduce it. This suggests that it is in fact the user misinterpreting the computer going to sleep. In turns this suggest the need for education about power saving. It is commonest with laptops so perhaps we need to include a handout, but it would also be useful to explore in the adoption class.

In my experience, a large minority of these cases were caused by faulty memory, enough so it was always worth checking. -- MW

"Computer can connect to the Internet"

You can ping and dig domains fine from the command line but Firefox times out because dns times out. In About:config search for ipv6 and set network.dns.disableipv6 to true. You might need to disable ipv6

"No Sound in a laptop"

check for a physical volume knob.

"Windows don't have a top bar or buttons, can't be resized etc"

Window Manager - Reset to Default

"Computer reboots when you shut it down"

set "acpi=strict" in the grub boot options (edit /etc/default/grub and run update grub. (Generally) useful for computers which don't adhere to acpi standards (I'm looking at you Sony).