GNOME search not working

After upgrading to Ubuntu 26.04, my gnome search often stopped working.  After Googling the issue, I found that this may be caused by a bad extension.

 

 

 

I then inspected the extensions available.  Instead of disabling all of them, I decided to first disable the ones I could do without.  I identified these three:

• snapd-prompting@canonical.com
• snapd-search-provider@canonical.com
• web-search-provider@ubuntu.com

To disable an extension, use the following command like below:

gnome-extensions disable snapd-prompting@canonical.com 

I has been a while since I disabled them, and the GNOME problem has not happened again.  I guess I found my culprits.

Disable Thums.db

Just found a way to disable the annoying thumbs.db from being created:

http://www.technoleros.com/turn-off-caching-of-windows-7-thumbnails-in-hidden-thumbs-db-files/

Well done Microsoft, it is very well hidden in gpedit.msc

"To start the Local Group Policy Editor, click the Windows 7 start icon and type gpedit.msc in the search text box and hit Enter.  The Editor will open to the top-level Local Computer Policy, so you will have to expand the User Configuration item in the left-side pane of the Editor window.  Drill down through Administrative Templates, then Windows Components, and click on the Windows Explorer item.  Near the top of the list in the right-hand pane of the Editor window you will find the setting “Turn off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files”  "

While you are there, you may want to disable Windows from showing recent search terms too.

Lock-up and ACPI

I have recently reformatted my old, but perfectly working IBM R40e laptop from Windows XP to Ubuntu. Everything works better than before but it has this annoying lock-up every now and then. One suggestion is to disable the power management (ACPI) by putting the extra setting to the

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi=force pci=acpi"

in the /etc/default/grub file (I am using grub2). Show far, it seems doing the trick. If you are in similar situation, you may want to give this trick a try.