Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

A snapshot update became available for my Nexus 5 this week. Here’s how to perform the upgrade:

1. On the phone in Settings > About Phone > Updates, remove any old updates you don’t need
2. Download the update to the phone
3. Back up the current ROM
   1. Make sure Privacy Guard is disabled for ROM Manager–if it’s not, the backup operation will just reboot the phone
   2. Make sure there’s enough space on the phone for a backup–backups need about 7 GB
   3. Perform a backup with ROM Manager
      1. It will show the path of the backup, in this case /sdcard/TWRP/BACKUPS/06c2deb6006b0cb2
      2. When asked for the name of the backup, whatever you name it will end up as a directory in the path above
   4. After the backup, the phone will reboot
   5. Save the backup to computer with sudo adb pull /sdcard/TWRP/BACKUPS/06c2deb6006b0cb2
4. Under Settings > About Phone > Updates, select the phone icon to the right of the downloaded update and choose “update”
5. TWRP will install the update and reboot the phone
6. Android will update all the apps–no GApps update is required for updates of the same CyanogenMod version

Download the KeePassX 0.4 .DEB from  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/xenial/amd64/keepassx/0.4.3+dfsg-0.1ubuntu1

sudo dpkg -i keepassx_0.4.3+dfsg-0.1ubuntu1_amd64.deb

sudo apt-get install -f

To prevent it from being upgraded to version 2, in Synaptic, select keepassx and, from the menu, select “Package” -> “Lock Version”.  Also make sure Software Updater isn’t set to automatically install updates, as it does not respect the version lock.

Jennings is a Lenovo K450E with an NVidia GTX 750 graphics card.

During the upgrade, two files were flagged as modified from the installed versions.  One was for Cups, the other for XSane.  Both of these changes were for a Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901 all-in-one printer using the legacy-1 driver.  The changes looked like the older versions might not work with the new software.  Since I have documented here what was required to get the Lexmark working, I chose the new files.  After the upgrade, I’ll need to check that printing and scanning still work and reapply the fixes if necessary.  (Printing left files sitting in the queue forever–reinstalling the printer drivers fixed the problem.)

The NVidia graphics card was not supported when I installed Ubuntu 14.04 and it’s still not supported with Ubuntu 16.04.  After the upgrade was finished, a reboot was required.  The graphical log-in screen never came up.  The fix for the driver issue is to replace the default nvidia drivers with nvidia-364:

1. Log in to your account in the TTY
2. sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*
3. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
4. sudo apt-get update
5. sudo apt-get install nvidia-364
6. Reboot

One other issue I had was that KeePass 0.4 is no longer included with the Ubuntu distribution.  I’m currently using a version 1 database because a few years ago it was the only version supported on all my devices (Ubuntu, Android and Windows).  KeePassX 2 can import the version 1 database used by KeePassX 0.4, but it’s a one-way upgrade.  My options are to upgrade on all my devices and switch to the version 2 database or manually install KeePassX 0.4.