Tutorials | Page 3 of 3

Use Wayland in a Live Instance of Ubuntu

This is from an AU question that I answered. The person wanted to know how to use Wayland while in a live instance of Ubuntu. It is something you can do.

The first thing you need to do, assuming you’re already booted into the live instance of Ubuntu, is change the way you login. You can click in the bottom right and ‘Show Applications.’ Once there, you can enter the word ‘users’, click on the settings app offered, and disable logging in automatically.

When you’re done with that, change the password. It turns out this is mandatory – and perhaps a bug. You’ll need to deal with Ubuntu’s need for a complex password, so just make sure it’s at least 12 characters long, not a dictionary word, and has a mix of numbers and letters. Yes, even in the live instance that’s temporary they want a complex password meeting whatever criteria they set.

Next, you want to edit /etc/gdm3/custom.conf and comment out the line that disables Wayland.

sudo nano /etc/gdm3/custom.conf

Find the line:

WaylandEnable=false

Change it to:

#WaylandEnable=false

Make sure to save it, obviously.

Restart gdm3 with:

 systemctl restart

Note: That may log you out, that’s fine. If it doesn’t automatically, log out manually.

Log back in, but after you click the user, there’s an icon in the lower right. It’s a gear icon. Click it and choose Ubuntu on Wayland. Then enter your password and press ENTER.

If everything worked, you’re logged in with Wayland.

Now, to verify this…

Press CTRL + ALT + T and open the terminal and enter:

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

Which should tell you that you’re using Wayland. If done correctly, it looks like this:

Good luck!

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How to Make a Dock in LXPanel

It’s actually pretty easy to make your own dock with LXPanel, it has the ability to do so built right in. It’s not too difficult, takes only a little time. When you’re done, it can look something like this:

1. Right click on an unoccupied space in your existing panel, and click on “Create New Panel.”

2. In the Geometry tab, decide where you want your new dock. Your choices are either side or on the top, and the top makes the most sense to me.

As you can see, that’s also where you choose the width, height, and icon size. Note: You can adjust those “live”, meaning as you change them in the preferences menu and immediately see the results. My choices resulted in the dock that you see there.

3. Now, you want to make it work like a dock. So, click on the Advanced tab and tick the appropriate boxes. This is also where you can select to keep it minimized when not in use. To make the dock visible, just move your mouse cursor to the top of the screen.

4. At this point, you’re going to want to populate your dock. It’s meant to be a useful tool, and you can make it one. Click on the Panel Applets tab and add Application Launch Bar.

It should end up looking something like that, though you may opt for different applets or positioning them in different places. The choice is, of course, entirely up to you.

5. Click on Application Launch Bar, click on Preferences, and then start adding the shortcuts to applications that you’d like to have in your dock.

6. At this point, you can also add other applets by going back to the Panel Applets section. Clicking preferences while they’re highlighted will let you change their settings. Again, you get to configure these any way you want to. Yay! Linux customization!

7. Finally, you can click on the Appearance tab and set background color, font color, and font size.

At this stage, I’d normally write something willowy, flowery, and praising the wonderful world of Linux, but that doesn’t really seem like something I need to do here. After all, if you’re here then you’re almost certainly a Linux user already – and you could even know more about it than I do!

Still, this is something I’ve seen asked here and there and I was literally doing nothing better today. So, now you know how to make a fancy-looking dock with LXPanel, an often overlooked panel solution that is much more capable than many people think.

Note: The author will be moving to LXQt soon. Expect to hear more about that.

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Removing Snap Apps

So many questions are answered by telling people to switch from their snap apps to regularly installed versions of the program. This is how you remove and disable them.

Fortunately, removing and disabling them is quite simple.

sudo apt purge snapd
sudo rm -rf ~/snap
sudo rm -rf /var/snap
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/snapd
sudo reboot

That will not only disable the snaps and prevent you from installing them, it will also remove any that you have already installed. This will shave some time off your boot and save a tiny amount of system resources.

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