Today when I attempted to launch VSCode on my Ubuntu laptop it silently failed to load. I opened a terminal window on the command line and it still silently failed. No error message or any indication of what the issue could be was presented. After some internet sleuthing I found the command:

code --verbose

This helped me identify the following issue that I found in the output:

vscode ENOSPC: System limit for number of file watchers reached

I found the solution here, and it explains the issue in more detail.

sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288
sudo sysctl -p

This temporarily resolves the issue. To make these changes permanent:

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
sudo sysctl -p

I believe the default value on my system was set to 8192. Strangely, I had been running this install for several weeks before I ran into this problem, running VSCode, Docker, Datagrip, Chrome with lots of open tabs, and other apps, and hadn’t started using anything new, so I’m unclear on what changed that caused this. Another one of life’s unsolved mysteries, I suppose!

Author: S. Eric Asberry
URL: https://blog.ericasberry.com/2024/07/01/VSCode-Fails-To-Start-On-Ubuntu/

Compared to when I used to download 3.5” floppy disk install images to set up Slackware on my machine, Linux has grown by leaps and bounds in terms of usability.  The majority of things seem to “just work” these days.  However, every once in awhile I run into some kind of weird issue.

In this case, I wanted to pair my MX Master Wireless Mouse with my Lenovo laptop running Ubuntu 16.04.  I don’t use the unifying receiver (which, to be honest, I don’t even know if I still have) because I generally just pair with Bluetooth so I have one less dongle to mess with.  That’s even more important in the case of a small laptop that doesn’t have a lot of USB ports to spare.

Adding a bluetooth device is theoretically pretty straightforward.  Go into the bluetooth settings and click “Add Device” while the mouse is in pairing mode.  It actually finds the MX Master just fine, and even claims to complete the pairing process.

However, it still doesn’t recognize the mouse, and the LED for the connection is still blinking instead of staying solid.  After a lot of googling, I finally found a solution that worked for me.  Once you have gone through the regular pairing procedure, enter the following commands (as root):

hciconfig hci0 sspmode 1
hciconfig hci0 down
hciconfig hci0 up

Voila, a working mouse!

Author: S. Eric Asberry
URL: https://blog.ericasberry.com/2016/09/30/Pairing-a-Logitech-MX-Master-Mouse-with-Ubuntu-16-04-Using-Bluetooth/