I installed Ubuntu Server 24.04 on a Raspberry Pi 5 then, installed the ubuntu-mate-desktop, but the screen resolution did not recognize the 1280x1024 resolution of the old Princeton monitor and reverted to a maximum resolution of 1024x768. I could set it with xrandr, but the setting was not permanent across a reboot.

I have a family member who has suffered a medical issue and has nerve damage in his hands. When moving the mouse his hand jitters due to the nerve damage.

When watching him use his computer (Ubuntu 24.04) I see that he tries to click something and then his hand jitters and the operating system interprets it as a click-and-drag rather than a simple click. For example, clicking a hyperlink, he often drags the text very slightly then releases it when trying to actually just click on the link. Is there an accessibility option I can turn on, or anything I can do to make Ubuntu less sensitive to this issue?

I'm thinking, if the mouse moves less than a 5mm radius during the click-and-drag, Ubuntu should interpret it instead as a regular click. Is it possible to do this?

I'm currently trying to install Ubuntu 26.04 on my Dell laptop, which is equipped with a Realtek RTL8852BE Wi-Fi card. I booted from the installation ISO, but I am running into issues when trying to connect to the internet.

The installer successfully detects and lists all available Wi-Fi networks. However, whenever I try to connect, the authentication fails. I have verified that both the SSID and passwords are correct, and the exact same problem occurs across all the different routers I have tested.

What should I check or investigate to troubleshoot this connection issue during the install phase?

Also, would it be a viable strategy to proceed with an offline installation first and then attempt to resolve the driver/network issues post-install?

Any guidance or troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated.

I want to install some zsh themes. But stupidly, I have deleted the whole configuration of the zshrc configuration file, and left the window blank. So it looks like this:

The problem is that manually typing the command ZSH_THEMES="jonathan" doesn't work after saving, and it doesn't show the theme.

I tried fixing it by typing these commands:

Resetting my zsh configuration using this command:

rm -f ~/.zshrc*

To verify the path of my shell:

which zsh

Set the default shell to zsh, if not done with:

chsh -s $(which zsh)

But the terminal still stays the same. My question is: How can I reset my zsh config so the blank file disappears?

The result should look like this:

(And yes I'am a newbie to Ubuntu)

I have installed the server on VirtualBox and allocated 2 vCPUs and 4096MB base memory.

So if I run free -h the output tells me 3.3Gi total, 474Mi used, and 2.7Gi free. Also 360Mi buff/cache and 2.8Gi available.

The same thing can be confirmed by using top. However the story changes when I use htop instead:

Memory is shown at 252M used out of 3.3G, much lower than the previous reports.
Why is this? I haven't changed any of VirtualBox's advanced settings & only used the unattended install with automatic download of Guest Additions, as well as the CPU & RAM allocations aforementioned.

I use Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS with Gnome 42.9. I have been using Variety Wallpaper changer for years which I always install from the Ubuntu repository. I have it set to start at startup and my backgrounds to change every 15 mins. It normally works incredibly well but last night, I noticed my wallpaper seemed to have been stuck on a certain image for a while. On further investigation, I found that the app indicator for Variety was missing.

Thinking the app had crashed, I went to re-start it manually from the menus and discovered I couldn't because its icon was not in the Gnome menu. Variety Slideshow's icon is still there and it functions fine. I opened the Ubuntu repository and found that according to the ubuntu package manager, it was still installed on my system. Nonetheless, I uninstalled and re-installed.

Nothing. No change. The icon is missing from the menus even after a system reboot and the program will not run at startup. I checked. The .desktopfile is still there.

I noticed in the forum, someone was having trouble using Variety on my version of ubuntu in dark mode. I use light mode, however.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. :)

GNOME Activities Overview workspace thumbnails begin flickering after several hours of uptime on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with GNOME Shell 50.1 running on Wayland and Intel Alder Lake-N integrated graphics (i915 driver).

System:

• Ubuntu 26.04 (upgraded from 24.04)
• GNOME Shell 50.1 / Mutter 50.1
• Wayland session (no Xorg session available)
• Intel Alder Lake-N UHD Graphics (i915 driver)
• Three displays (all 1920×1080 @ 60Hz)

Symptoms:

• After several hours of uptime, GNOME Activities Overview becomes visually corrupted.
• Specifically, workspace thumbnails flicker immediately upon entering Overview (Super key or hot corner).
• The flickering is limited to Overview workspace thumbnails and GNOME top bar. Normal desktop, application windows remain stable and unaffected.
• Exiting Overview immediately returns the desktop to normal. Logging out and back in resolves the issue temporarily, but it returns in minutes, rebooting it returns after several hours. No GPU resets, hangs, or DRM errors appear in journalctl.

I’ve tried:

• Kernel parameter: intel_idle.max_cstate=1 Appears to delay or partially change the symptoms, but the issue still occurs.
• Kernel parameter: i915.enable_dc=0 Initially seemed to reduce symptoms, but the issue still returned.
• Tested different kernels (including older kernel) No change in long-term behavior.
• Disabled a couple of third-party GNOME extensions (still using default Ubuntu extensions).

Observations:

• The issue does not affect application rendering or the desktop outside of Activities Overview.
• It appears only after extended uptime (hours), not immediately after login.
• The issue is reproducible across reboots and kernel versions.
• No relevant errors in journalctl related to i915, DRM, or GPU resets.

Question:

Has anyone seen GNOME Activities Overview workspace thumbnail flickering or corruption on GNOME Shell 50 / Mutter 50 under Wayland, particularly on Intel integrated graphics? Are there known issues, workarounds, or logs that I should investigate further?

Update:

I performed additional testing and found a significant correlation with monitor configuration.

With my original multi-monitor setup (2 ASUS monitors + 1 TCL TV), GNOME Shell produced thousands of repeated errors:

gbm_surface_lock_front_buffer failed Failed to query buffer age, got error 3003

These sessions also exhibited Activities Overview flickering, top-panel flickering, and occasional window-edge artifacts.

I have now tested the system with a single display only (different display: Sony TV over HDMI) and the issue has not reproduced. There is no visible flickering, no rendering corruption, and:

journalctl -b | grep -c "gbm_surface_lock_front_buffer failed" 0

journalctl -b | grep -c "Failed to query buffer age" 0

The issue also reproduced across multiple kernels, including a newer mainline kernel Linux 7.0.12-070012-generic, which makes a pure kernel/i915 explanation seem less likely. Using this mainline kernel the symptoms also started appearing after roughly 10 minutes rather than a few hours.

At this point, the strongest lead appears to be a GNOME Shell/Mutter multi-monitor rendering issue, or an interaction involving multiple outputs.

I'm trying to install a php application (Nextcloud, if it's important) on my Ubuntu 24.04.4 server and I keep getting an error message saying:

                       Can't write into config directory!
 This can usually be fixed by giving the webserver write access to the config directory.

.

The thing is, the config directory already has 755 permissions and is owned by www-data. I've been trying to troubleshoot this with the Nextcloud forum and they just threw up their hands and said it's an Ubuntu problem. Their suggestion was to wipe the entire installation and rebuild; I can't do that because it's also my mail server and I need that.

Any help or advice gratefully accepted!

Oh, before I forget: the php installation is the latest 8.5 from Ondrej's repository.

Background

My normal process for writing ISOs is downloading them (zsync via script which performs a ISO validation & shows me the package changes (ie. manifest diff from prior download)), then use mkusb to write it to thumb-drive, eg.

guiverc@d7050-next:/de2900/lubuntu_64$ sudo mkusb-nox mantic-desktop-amd64.iso all

I then quickly scan messages & if it looks good, eject the thumb-drive, and boot it on a nearby box & confirm media write there using a method documented here, ie.

• boot it in try mode, and wait awhile to let background media validation occur, scanning the systemd journal using

sudo journalctl |grep casper-md5check

watching for

May 11 08:37:47 ubuntu casper-md5check[3924]: Checking ./boot/grub/loopback.cfg...../boot/grub/loopback.cfg: OK
May 11 08:37:47 ubuntu casper-md5check[3924]: Check finished: no errors found.
May 11 08:37:47 ubuntu systemd[1]: Finished casper-md5check.service - casper-md5check Verify Live ISO checksums.

This validation I believe is essential, as I find 5-8% of ISO writes fail regardless of the hardware being used (ie. different boxes & different thumb-drives).

Question

Can I validate the ISO write using an easy tool, using the same box I used to write it (ie. no reboot or nearby box necessary).

My preference is terminal; as it's where I am for these tasks.

I recently tried using this answer to create a custom .img of my system. I created a fresh Ubuntu Install in a new partition, set everything up, installed all the bloat I need for some stuff and then switched to main my Main Partition to flash an .img of the partition using the default disk manager and Create Partition Image.

It all worked and I now have the .img. I named it accordingly:

(It is 16gb in size)

Then I tried using dd to flash it to a SanDisk 32 Gb USB Stick (150MB Read Speed):

sudo dd bs=4M if=BloatBuntu.img of=/dev/sdd conv=fsync status=progress

That all went fine. I now had the Stick with the stuff on it:

Then I shut off my laptop, pressed down the F12 key as hard as I could and there it was. The glorious Boot Menu. I selected my USB stick thinking everything would go fine and I'd have a nice Live USB everything usable and cool and amazing and rainbow. Instead I got launched right back into the boot menu. Then I tried again - same thing.

So I booted back into my main partition and tried to use this thing in the default disk manager to flash it again. I assumed I'd just messed up the command or something (I'm quite new to Linux, maybe 1 Week). Then I waited for a long period of time and It finished!

Excited I boot into the menu. It said that the Disk isn't bootable and that I should "insert a bootable floppy disk".
Then, a thought came to my mind "Maybe this 32GB San Disk USB Stick is just broken". So I flashed it to a 64 GB San Disk Ultra Extreme SD Card that was much faster. I tried again and again. Nothing ever worked.

When I tried an Ubuntu ISO, which I downloaded via Torrrent to not put strain on their mirrors, it all worked and booted fine.

Now I come here, does anybody have an idea why my USB wont boot? What can be done to help it?

For clarity, I have an Acer Aspire 5 A515-51G-5504

I installed 18.04 years ago and I've been using it ever since. I now use virtual machines for everything but when I started dabbling in linux back in 2018, I didn't understand how bad it was to install stuff on my host machine.

A couple years ago I had to install Wine to do some stuff for work and I'm kind of suspicious that it's malicious. I've tried to get rid of it but it refuses to die, like Tyrion Lannister. I've backed up everything I care about so now I'm 100% cool with nuking this whole thing and starting with a fresh installation of 18.04

My question is: should I change anything about BIOS or UEFI before I plug in my bootable flash drive and go through the installation process? I'm pretty sure I evidently did everything correct when I did this back in 2018 because everything has been fine. I changed my password in BIOS (which I do remember) and I'm pretty sure I enabled secure boot back then for UEFI. I just don't know if I should do this stuff again. Note: I do use this computer for work so I'm super nervous about screwing it up

This is what I get when I do lspci:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation UHD Graphics 620 (rev 07)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP USB 3.0 xHCI Controller (rev 21)
00:15.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP Serial IO I2C Controller #0 (rev 21)
00:15.1 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP Serial IO I2C Controller #1 (rev 21)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP CSME HECI #1 (rev 21)
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 21)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP PCI Express Root Port #1 (rev f1)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP PCI Express Root Port #5 (rev f1)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP PCI Express Root Port #6 (rev f1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Intel(R) 100 Series Chipset Family LPC Controller/eSPI Controller - 9D4E (rev 21)
00:1f.2 Memory controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP PMC (rev 21)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio (rev 21)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP SMBus (rev 21)
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP108M [GeForce MX150] (rev a1)
02:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8411B PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
02:00.1 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 12)
03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 31)

And this is what I get when I do sudo dmidecode -t bios -q

    Vendor: Insyde Corp.
    Version: V1.13
    Release Date: 11/08/2017
    Address: 0xE0000
    Runtime Size: 128 kB
    ROM Size: 8192 kB
    Characteristics:
        PCI is supported
        BIOS is upgradeable
        BIOS shadowing is allowed
        Boot from CD is supported
        Selectable boot is supported
        EDD is supported
        Japanese floppy for NEC 9800 1.2 MB is supported (int 13h)
        Japanese floppy for Toshiba 1.2 MB is supported (int 13h)
        5.25"/360 kB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
        5.25"/1.2 MB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
        3.5"/720 kB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
        3.5"/2.88 MB floppy services are supported (int 13h)
        8042 keyboard services are supported (int 9h)
        CGA/mono video services are supported (int 10h)
        ACPI is supported
        USB legacy is supported
        BIOS boot specification is supported
        Targeted content distribution is supported
        UEFI is supported
    BIOS Revision: 1.13
    Firmware Revision: 1.10

Please note that apparently, installing Ubuntu on Acer Aspires is notoriously difficult but somehow I managed to do it in 2018. If I should upgrade my BIOS, will that do something unexpected and negative? Part of me doesn't want to touch anything that isn't broken but I also do not want to compromise my security at all.

So am I good-to-go for doing a fresh install of 18.04 from here? Or am I about to screw this up? Thanks :)

I am unable to install anything on my Ubuntu 20.04. The reason looks like dpkg: error: dpkg frontend lock is locked by another process. This is used by following root process /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade. Also I tried to kill the process but I am getting following error:bash: kill: (9006) - Operation not permitted.Not sure what I can do.Can anyone please help me with this.

I want help to

• make Ubuntu 'update && upgrade' itself automatically,
• select the settings for this automatic system.

How can I do it? Please advice about

• where to find the menu (GUI) or file (command line) to do it,
• what settings that can be recommended (if different from the default).

As a bonus, please describe how different types of program packages are treated,

• program packages from Ubuntu repositories and PPAs
• snap packages
• flatpak packages
• other kinds of programs/packages.

I've installed a persistent installation of Lubuntu 19.04 on my USB a while back, which was running with no problems until the booting process started giving errors.

Only the lines after and including [ OK ] started appearing when it stopped booting. The lines before that have always appeared, but they didn't prevent the system from booting.

I've used this tutorial to install before.

The USB used to appear as one drive before in Windows 10, but now it appears like this:

I have no clue what any of these errors mean, and because I'm not very fluent in Linux I think it might be easier to make a fresh install, so if anyone knows how I can fix this that would be great! But if fixing it is too difficult for someone that's not great with Linux, I'm also OK with making a backup of the persistent storage and reinstalling the system, which I would also need help for.

Persistent live drive with a partition for persistence

There are some web sites describing

• new tools
• new features in [new versions of] old tools

that can create a persistent live drive from an iso file with Ubuntu 19.10 and the corresponding Ubuntu family flavours.

• Why and how does it work?
• How is it different from earlier methods for persistent live drives?
• Isn't live the default for a cloned drive?

I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 in a VirtualBox on a Windows 10 machine.

I'm trying to create and test a Docker swarm by creating a couple virtual machines on my (virtual) Ubuntu OS. (I know, I know. VMs on VMs on VMs. I should just get a Mac). I've downloaded VirtualBox in Ubuntu, and am running the following at command-line:

docker-machine create --driver virtualbox myvm1

Which returns:

Running pre-create checks... Error with pre-create check: "This computer doesn't have VT-X/AMD-v enabled. Enabling it in the BIOS is mandatory"

Virtualization is enabled on my Windows 10 machine:

Virtualization also appears enabled for Ubuntu, as viewed through the VirtualBox Settings (running on Windows):

I've tried to enable through the Ubuntu BIOS on startup, but I can't seem to get in there to change anything. If I press F2 or F12 or ESC (or any key for that matter), I can see a list of processes running during startup, but don't have any control, and the OS just boots as normal. Ancillary question, is there a BIOS for Ubuntu running on a VM, or just one for my hardware?

I read that perhaps I should disable Fast Startup on my Windows machine, and have done that, but have seen no difference. And my host machine boots up pretty fast anyway, too.

UPDATE:

If I run in Ubuntu Terminal,

grep --color vmx /proc/cpuinfo

nothing is returned. Same for svm, which would appear to confirm that virtualization is not enabled or possible. The ultimate question is, how do I enable it?

I tried to create a Windows 10 USB boot medium with WoeUSB. I formatted a USB drive with an NTFS partition, but WoeUSB complains with:

Installation failed!
Exit code: 256
Log:
WoeUSB v@@WOEUSB_VERSION@@
==============================
Mounting source filesystem...
Error: File "/media/woeusb_source_1543626298_6098/sources/install.wim" in
source image has exceed the FAT32 Filesystem 4GiB Single File Size Limitation
and cannot be installed.  You must specify a different --target-filesystem.
Refer: https://github.com/slacka/WoeUSB/wiki/Limitations#fat32-filesystem-4gib-single-file-size-limitation for more info.
Unmounting and removing "/media/woeusb_source_1543626298_6098"...
You may now safely detach the target device

I've also tried to start WoeUSB via command line, did not work.

sudo woeusb --partition Win10_1809Oct_English_x64.iso /dev/sdb

My iso is located in: home/sawyer/Downloads/Win10_1809Oct_English_x64.iso

Thanks in advance! I've been trying to get windows installed for three nights now, so any help towards that goal is greatly appreciated.

I want to try new OS releases as they arrive, such as Ubuntu 17.04 or Ubuntu 17.10 to see new features. I also like to look at Kubuntu, CentOS or other distros (Windows 11 when it arrives?) - or set up test environments knowing I may trash them and do not want to do this to my core machine.

What set of alternatives are there to do this without risking my main development machine? I am not looking for a debate on the BEST way, but which alternatives are available.

I've done it before but I had to re-purposed that USB drive and I can't seem to figure out how I got ddrescue installed the first time around. Which file do I need from here http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ddrescue/ and, once copied to my bootable thumb drive, how can I install it so I can access it via terminal?

I'm new to Linux so I need step by step if possible.

I written an ISO image to my hard disk using sudo dd if=image.iso of=/dev/sda. I meant /dev/sdc, and now running sudo fdisk -l returns only one partition on /dev/sda while there is supposed to be 6. Is it possible to recover my data?

I didn't shut down (reboot) my computer yet.

In my /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades file I found this:

// Automatically reboot *WITHOUT CONFIRMATION*
//  if the file /var/run/reboot-required is found after the upgrade
//Unattended-Upgrade::Automatic-Reboot "false";

The issue is that I don't know what the default value is and so if I need to uncomment the line (I don't want my server to reboot btw.).

Should I uncomment the line by safety? Are there further actions to perform after doing that?

Using a fresh install 17.04 lUbuntu

Fairly new to Ubuntu and as often is my problem any help I try to find is way more advanced than I can follow.

I'm trying to use test my AMD R9 290 card for mining using Genoils miner. I tried it on Windows before installing Ubuntu and that worked fine.

The problem is when I try to get it working I get this error:

[OPENCL]:No OpenCL platforms found
[OPENCL]:
Listing OpenCL devices.
FORMAT: [deviceID] deviceName

I know at least some OpenCL related packages are installed.

As I understand it I should use an open source driver called AMDGPU instead of AMD's driver. But I can't figure out if it's already installed or if not how to install it. The AMDGPU page mentions some xf86-video-amdgpu that I get "unable to locate" on.

I tried AMD's own proprietary driver and with that installed OpenCL works but I then get an error that i have the wrong DRM version: "amdgpu_device_initialize: DRM version is 2.45.0 but this driver is only compatible with 3.x.x." As I understand it AMDGPU uses 3.x.x while AMD's own driver uses 2.x.x.

So from what I've found out you can use this command to check if you're using the open source AMDGPU

lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 vga

If the kernel driver in use says "radeon" rather than "fglrx" it's using AMDGPU.

I blacklisted AMD's driver using the instrucitons on the AMDGPU page:

/etc/modprobe.d/radeon.conf

blacklist radeon

(Although I find it a bit odd that it here should say "blacklist radeon" while the kernel driver (using the command above) should report "radeon" with AMDGPU)

Anyway I was still unable to get it to work with OpenCL. OpenCL still reported no devices. From what I've learned this seems to be because many things including OpenCL aren't fully supported on newer Ubuntu versions like my 17.04. Best might be Ubuntu 14 for this.

In the end I took the easy way out and installed Windows 10 using an old key :f When I get some more time I will try again using an old Ubuntu release and see if I can get it working.

• Ubuntu 14.04LTS server, I have no GUI desktop
• In my example I'll use a fake IP address.
• Trying to mount from Ubuntu to \1.2.3.4\users\me\subdir. Someone has to put a spreadsheet file on the \1.2.3.4\users\me\subdir and my program on Ubuntu has to read it.
• I can ping 1.2.3.4 just fine, so it can't be a firewall issue, right?

I have read about 12 pages from my goole search, a few from this forum but I have nothing that works yet. This is what I did.

sudo mount -t cifs '\\1.2.3.4/users/shared/chuck/subdir' /home/comp/mnt/subdir -o username=chuck,password=CR4gilson 
mount error(115): Operation now in progress
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)

This message is in /var/log/syslog:

Feb 15 09:43:56 ubuntucomp kernel: [7519048.289580] CIFS VFS: Error connecting to socket. Aborting operation.
Feb 15 09:43:56 ubuntucomp kernel: [7519048.289872] CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -115

In my ufw output samba seems to be allowed anywhere:

Samba                      ALLOW       Anywhere

Thank you!

I would like to use the i3 Window Manager with Ubuntu and not Unity.

Since I am going to do a fresh install Id like to keep the bloat to a minimum.

Should I just install it normally with the Desktop version and remove Unity and compiz or install the Server version and then install X and i3?

Is it the same or are there any things I should be wary of?

I know questions that sound like this one have been asked before, but none of the "solutions" are working for me. I am using Gnome Classic option.

• I could not find any extension that does what I want.
• I could not find any entry for gnome-panel in my dconfEditor

Will you please help me.

I installed Gnome 3 using sudo apt-get install ubuntu-gnome-desktop. I am talking of the panel visible in the following picture:

These are the list of extensions I have installed:

I want to install Ubuntu on my laptop that doesn't have a CD-ROM drive and I have no spare USB disk. I've tried Wubi, but that doesn't seem to work (since it prompts me to have the CD in the drive, which I don't have).

How can I install Ubuntu, easily and in a fast way?

P.s: I want to dual boot it with Windows 7 (which was preinstalled).

Edit:

1. When extracting the ISO to a folder and running Wubi it does install, but when I reboot the computer, it doesn't show GRUB, nor can I choose if I want to boot Ubuntu or Windows 7.

2. After trying for the third time today, wubi gives me an error: Permission denied

I'm the administrator on the PC.

Can anyone offer advice on a program for compiling and publishing a book?

I have Scribus but am having a rough time with it. I was very good with Quark... I need something that has style sheets, page numbers, contents.

If Scribus is the best for those purposes, I guess I'll have to keep working with it but as of now I really hate it.

I'd like to create a Windows bootable USB stick, but I don't have a Windows machine at the moment to do so. How can I achieve that using Ubuntu?

I have a MicroSD card in a USB adapter (which plugs into a USB port on my machine, and acts like a USB flash drive). I was using Unetbootin to make this a bootable USB flash drive with Kubuntu. But I needed to cancel while it was working. So I killed the Unetbootin process from the console.

Since then, I can't format the MicroSD or delete the folder that Kubuntu made. I have also tried mkdosfs, with no success. I can't mount the drive anymore either? What can I do to make this drive usable again?

Trying to create a new partition table in GParted, as described in Eliah Kagan's answer, does not work. It fails with the error message "imposible crear tabla de particiones" ("unable to create a partition table").

If you are hurrying to reply, System → Administration → StartUp Disk Creator -- no, that's not what I'm talking about.

I want to try Ubuntu 11.04's Unity without touching my existing Ubuntu install.

To do this, I need to install the nVidia drivers first (sigh).

To do this, I need changes to persist a reboot.

To do this, I need to really install Ubuntu on a USB key.

How do you do that?

What I tried

1. I tried to make a USB key from Testdrive, then boot from it, then choose "Install Ubuntu." The installer refused to install to the installation media itself.

2. I tried, from my installed copy of Ubuntu:

   sudo kvm /dev/sdb --cdrom .cache/testdrive/iso/ubuntu_natty-desktop-i386.iso
   

   ...but the installer didn't detect the disk properly.