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There are a pair of bugs that popped up when I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, or should I say one popped up when I made the upgrade and the other sems to have popped up in the last several days, but I’m glad to be able to say that I have found fixes for both of them thanks to the Ubunutu community.
Same thing happened to me on two different boxes after the upgrade to 9.04 – looks like a python upgrade might have been the issue. If you open /usr/bin/pympd in your favourite editor, you’ll see that the first line reads:
#!/usr/bin/python2.5
Change the 2.5 to 2.6 so that it reads:
#!/usr/bin/python2.6
Worked perfectly for me, but ymmv…
It worked beautifully for me and I now have mypd available as an MPD GUI in addition to Relaxx and my all time fav, Sonata.
What the hell broke Frostwire?
Several days ago I tried to fire up FrostWire to do a little downloading but for some reason it resulted in errors. I have no idea what changed on my system other than some updates I’ve taken, but I don’t know which one caused the issue. All I know for sure is that FrostWire could no longer see my Java installation anymore. Luckily I found the FrostWire docs on the Ubuntu Community Documentation site, and sure enough the first thing on that page talks about an invalid JRE message. All I had to do was to run sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun in a terminal and select the alternative that matches the installation of Sun’s Java that I have installed.
:~$ sudo update-alternatives --config java
[sudo] password for peng2:
There are 5 alternatives which provide `java'.
Selection Alternative
-----------------------------------------------
*+ 1 /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java
2 /usr/bin/gij-4.2
3 /usr/bin/gij-4.3
4 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun/jre/bin/java
5 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java
Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 5
Using '/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java' to provide 'java'.
:~$
Once I did that I was able to fire up FrostWire and get back to the downloading I needed to do.
We have a progress report on AWN 0.4
Today when I was checking for new posts on the Avant Window Navigator Forums I saw a new thread from Mark Lee (aka malept) that includes a link to an update on the current progress on AWN 0.4, along with a video. For all of you who have been wanting to move the AWN dock to the sides of your desktop, you’ll love what Mark’s video shows.
As a matter of fact, the video is so good I’ll provide it for you here, although you’ll want to read his post for some information that the vid doesn’t include.
He also has a link to Moonbeam’s update post, but he does include the highlights for those who only want to read a single post. Both malept and Moonbeam rock, and one day I’m going to have to buy both of them several brews a piece.
I bet you guys (and gals) thought I wasn’t doing these links posts anymore. Things have been crazy on my end of things but I’ve still been making notes of things I wanted to share with y’all. I won’t post all of them (some are well over a week old) but I do have a dozen or so that I think you’ll like.
Leo Iannacone: A simple plugin for Sonata… If you love the Sonata GUI for MPD Leo has a plugin that you may love as well. What does it do? Read his post for all the good news.
Martin Owens: Who Needs Flash, I Don’t, SVG For Me. Martin has found a great way to use rich graphics for the web without having to go the proprietary route with Flash.
Josselin Mouette: Reporting userful bugs. One of the biggest issues for any software tester is the need to file a bug report with the information that will help the devs identify the problem enough so they can see about fixing it. If you even help test a single prerelease software application you should bookmark Josselin’s post.
Kartik Mistry: artha. Ubuntu ships with a dictionary application, but every now and then you need a thesaurus. Artha may be just what the doctor ordered.
John Stowers: Playing With Clutter.Last October I started a links post with some news about Gloobus, a nice open source way to bring the MacOS coverflow feature to GNU/Linux, and John has some nice info on getting it to play well with Nautilus, one of the biggest issues with Gloobus, which isn’t any fault of the Gloobus dev.
David Thomas: Preston Gralla: Why you Shouldn’t Care. David read an article in Computerworld that tries to minimize the benefits of Linux. David writes a very well thought out response that shows why Mr. Gralla’s article doesn’t seem to have all that much to do with a little something we like to call facts.
Matthew Revell: Launchpad’s YouTube channel. Matthew has created a channel on YouTube where you can find demos on how to use all the benefits of the Launchpad code hosting service.
Paul Cutler: Meet Snowy, Tomboy’s best friend. Tomboy, the note-taking applet from the good people at GNOME, has gotten a web app that will make your Tomboy notes even more uesful.
Lior Kaplan: “Get Openoffice.org” icon on a new laptop. What would you say if you bought a new laptop and found an icon to get the most popular open source office productivity suite on your desktop? No, I don’t mean like you get when you install a GNU/Linux distribution on your computer, because they tend to have the actual apps installed rather than simply providing you with a “get me” icon. What if that new laptop came from Toshiba? And had Microsoft Vista and MS Office 2007 installed? That’s right, that’s the very thing Lior found on his brand-spanking-new, fresh out of the box Toshiba laptop.
Stefano Forenza: GiftWrap helps you create .debs. Every now and then a GNU/Linux user needs to install an application that doesn’t have a pre-compiled package. Now people who run Debian-based Linux distros have a nice little helper, except rather than using the link to the debs that Stefano provides for installing GiftWrap you should use the GiftWrap devs’ PPA so you make sure you have all the dependencies satisfied when you install it. I’ll see if I can use it to create a .deb of Mac4Lin to make the install process even easier.
Paul Tagliamonte: Making a bootable USB drive. Have you tried creating a bootable USB drive so you can have your favorite operating system on just about any computer? I have, and I’ve run into some issues, although I’m thinking it may be due to a BIOS setting I need to tweak. Anywho, Paul has a great tutorial to walk you through the process of making a bootable USB drive.
Andrew SB: “Because humans need Oxygen.” You may know Andrew from his andrewsomething PPA on Launchpad (which has a ton of software you should check out if you run a Debian-based Linux distro), brings a little Sweet to his news about a new icon set. Or am I the only one that thinks of that band when you read his article?
One of the pleasant surprises I’ve seen while perusing our stats is the amount of traffic we’ve gotten from people looking for info on the Mac4Lin Transformation Kit. (Yes, we’re still in Release candidate status for version 1.0, but we’re hoping we can get it out before summer ends.) The good people at SourceForge are taking nominations for the 2009 Community Choice Awards. Please help us by nominating the Mac4Lin for Best Visual Design.
Mac4Lin
Did Google’s servers suffer a concussion?
Now for the not so great news. As the tech news media is reporting, yesterday Google had a network glitch that made many parts of their sites unavailable for about an hour. But as many Gmail users will tell you, they’ve been having a pretty major issue with showing images for a couple weeks now. The problem is that when Gmail shows you an image that includes images they ask you if you want to see them, but their servers have suffered amnesia as to whether you have said to always show the images or not. It’s getting to the point that I’m having to say “always show the damned images from this sender” on a daily basis for many of the same senders, and some users are reporting that they’re doing it multiple times in a single day. Just today I had to tell Google that I always want to see the images from a good 90% of the senders that I have email subscriptions with for news, shopping info (such as sale flyers) and entertainment (such as ICHC and Comics.com). Sarah, one fo Google’s employees, said that the devs are aware of the issue and are working on it, but she posted that on 30 April and we don’t seem to be any closer to a resolution than we were when she posted the response and their blog has been strangely silent on the matter. Unfortunately it’s making some of us question whether we were smart when we elected to rely on Google for many of their services, such as email, online documents and site search.
So if you’re thinking about signing up with Google for something, you may want to hold off on it or go with someone else until they get their act together better.
I was going to save my links for one more day, but there’s one that I want to post today for everyone. And no, it’s not about the malware that Windows users are having to deal with.
Tom Dryer: Upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 Beta. Yet another report on how the upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 went. I won’t post all the ones I find (I hope not at least) but Tom’s a great source of tutorials so I definitely wanted to make sure people saw his. It’s not all beer & skittles, and it’s nice to see someone give a balanced report with both positives and negatives. (As I’ll post this weekend the beta LiveCD saw my wireless USB with absolutely no problems, something 8.10 didn’t do.)
Steven Harms: New NVidia driver out. Nvidia released a new stable 180 driver for those who use them. I’ll have to check it out when I’m back at my Ubuntu box.
Bryan Quigley: Ctrl-Alt-Backspace (Restarts X, don’t do it). It turns out not everyone’s tyhrilled with the decision to remove the hotkey combination to force a new X video session. Brian has some nice info on the matter.
Craig A. Eddy: To PulseAudio or Not To PulseAudio . . . Craig looks at the issue that is PulseAudio, along with info on how to get rid of it if you don’t want to use it. Thanks, Craig!
Stefano Forenza: TomTom settles, is Microsoft shooting its own foot ? I was hoping to see a nice article from the Ubuntu community about the recent settlement between Microsoft and TomTom since TomTom uses some Linux kernel code, and once again Stefano rides to the rescue.
Isabelle Duchatelle: Medibuntu: non-free-codecs for Jaunty. It’s getting to be that time again, time to update the repo info for the next version of Ubuntu Linux. Isabelle has the info you need if you want to use packages from Medibuntu with Ubuntu 9.04.
Jeffrey Detras: Hardy-ier than before. Believe it or not some people prefer Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” to Ubuntu 9.04. Jeffrey has some very good reasons for going back to 8.04 after testing the beta for Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope.”
Before I close this post, I have to share one more thing. It’s April Fools Day and while Nanci and I aren’t doing anything with the blog to “celebrate” the day, there are some really nice gags out there. Stefano Forenza is compiling a list of the Linux-based gags he finds so if you want to find a single place to see most of them Stefano’s blog is the place you want to be.
I’m not posting anything about the Conficker worm (other than a link to Panji Nushantara’s article) that has info that Windows users reallyshould have known about by now) for two major reasons. This blog deals with GNU/Linux, specifically Ubuntu Linux. It’s not that I don’t really give a rat’s bum about Windows (I really don’t), it’s that this isn’t the place Windows users should be looking for info like that. Besides, if you run Windows you have a responsibility to make sure you have all the security patches. Uuser with unpatched Windows systems have reasons to worry. If you’ve kept your patches up-to-date (or don’t run Windows) you have little (if anything) to worry about.
That’s a lid, folks. See you tomorrow, and don’t take any wooden nickels, ok?
Updated to include note about the PHP version of the Ubuntu 9.04 [countdown. -Peng]
I tried to post some links yesterday but as soon as I hit the save button to lock in some tage and my text I was rewarded with a 100% blank post. Hopefully this post will last long enough to publish it.
Pavel Rojtberg: Giving Google Earth a native look & feel. One of the biggest complaints about Google apps on Linux (other than some apps actually not being native Linux apps because they shove an extra installation of WINE down our throats) is how butt ugly they are. Pavel walks us through what we need to do to get them looking like the theme we have selected.
Jonathan Carter: The correct way to file bugs in Ubuntu. Filing bugs is important when you help test new releases, but I found out yesterday I was doing it wrong because I went straight to Launchpad to file my bug. Jonathan lets us know not only how do to it properly but also why the way I was doing it is a bad idea.
Steven Harms: Thank You. Steven writes a wonderful post to the people who help make Ubuntu Linux such a wonderful distribution. As for me, I’m just going to say, “What Steven wrote.”
Tiago Vaz: Some cool audio stuff for Debian. Usually when people write about cool audio tools for GNU/Linux they’re referring to media player apps like Amarok, MPD and Totem. But Tiago has good news for musicians, especiallt guitar players, as he tells us about some virtual processing gear.
Steve Langasek: Ubuntu 9.04 Beta released. I know this should probably get a post of it’s own, but I’m tight on time since I needed to reclaim yesterday’s links from Google Reader. The first beta release of Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope” is now available for downloading. I’ll snag it this weekend and post my thoughts about it.
Nick Ali: Ubuntu 9.04 Countdown Banner. If you have your own blog or website you may want to snag the countdown banner to help countdown the says until Ubuntu 9.04 is released. Stefano Forenza also has the code on his site, as well as tips for people like Nanci and I who aren’t allowed to use any JavaScript on their blog. That was a pain in the rear the last two releases (Thanks, WP.com) and we’re glad the devs thought of us this time around. Updated 29 March: If you can’t use JavaScript grab the PHP code from Stefano’s post. It’s working fine on our blog!
Daniel T. Chen: Lessons Learned at Jaunty Beta. Not everything went 100%smoothly with the alpha versions of Ubuntu 9.04, and Daniel clues us in on some of the things the dev team had to deal with.
That’s it for today. I may have some links to share tomorrow, but look for our report on how Jaunty behaves on our hardware this weekend. Until then, enjoy the weekend!
[Corrected the first link. Thanks to Nick and Keba for pointing it out. -Peng]
I bet you guys thought I wasn’t going to post any links this week. I’ve actually been snagging a bunch of links into a gDocfile so I can share them without clogging up my feed reader with unread posts. Unfortunately there are a bunch of them, so rather than give you the link with my thoughts on each I’m just going to copy and paste the links for you. Feel free to follow any and all links that tickle your curiosity.
Neil Williams: Goodbye network-manager, hello wicd(I want to check this out some more since we changed out WiFi settings a week ago and I can’t figure out where the hell to update my settings)
Whew! That should give you some things to read over the weekend. I know some of the articles are from late last month, but that’s how long I’ve been grabbing these links and I wanted to make sure you guys had seen them.
Have a great weekend, and don’t forget to let your favorite open source devs know you appreciate all their hard work. And speaking of hard work, I have an idea for a promotional vid or two, and if all goes well I may have some footage for you guys to check out sometime in the next month or so. See y’all next week!
It’s been a while, hasn’t it. I’ve been marking some things to blog this week but I simply haven’t had the chance to share them so this will be a fairly long post.
Stafano Forenza: [HOWTO] Get the new Notifications on Intrepid. The release of Ubuntu 9.04 will see some new, and much nicer display of the system notifications. Unfortunately they’re not being met with universal love. Luckily those of us too chicken to start testing the alphas of Ubuntu Jaunty (alpha 5 has just been released) can still play in a corner of the big kids’ pool.
Morten Welinder: The Gtk+ File Chooser Dialog, Take II. Users of Ubuntu 8.10 have complained quite a bit about the very borked File Chooser dialog (which should be fixed in Ubuntu 9.04), and the current attempts at a new dialog in OpenSuSE 11.1 isn’t making very many friends either. Hopefully we’ll get something that won’t make people stick with the 8.04 LTS release just to have a usable dialog. And yes, I am aware that a dialog is a pretty lame reason to stick with the LTS release, but for users on the fence it could be the deciding factor.
Karl Bowden: Retheaming Ubuntu – Part 3. Karl has a really nice series on making a new theme for GNOME and Ubuntu.
Omshivprakash HL: Medibuntu for Jaunty Jackalope. Medibuntu has log been a favored way to get non-free tools and codecs for Ubuntu, and the Platonic blog has easy steps for Jaunty users and testers to get the tools they may need. (My apologies to the blog owner but I have no clue which name I should use for you so I took the easy way out.)
Miguel de Icaza: Gnome Do. That wonderful tool that I simply can’t use Ubuntu without has gotten a website update. If you love things shiny you want to check out the new site. And if you use Do you’ll find some great resources for how to make the most of it.
Christer Edwards: Enable Basic Compositing for Gnome-Do 0.8.x. Gnome Do’s latest update joins AWN in requiring some sort of compositing to work properly. Metacity will let you do it, especially in Ubuntu 9.04, an Christer posts a tutorialthat shows you how, although it will cause issues for Compiz. But first Christer has an easy to follow tutorial on using my favored backup compositor, xcompmgr.
David Futcher: My Experiences with PulseAudio. PulseAudio is loved by many users but is a thorn in other users’ sides. David relates his experiences, which lead him to believe Ubuntu may have picked it up prematurely.
Launchpad News: Links to external bug trackers right where you need them. Launchpad has made it much easier for bug reporters to track and file bugs upstream. This has been something long needed and I’m glad to see Launchpad is making it easier to get bugs filed in GNOME, Mozilla, etc.
Mackenzie Morgan: Ubuntu audio blog. Mackenzie has found a great blog about PulaseAudio and ALSA that isn’t part of Planet Ubuntu, nor is it part of part of Planet GNOME or Planet Debian, but subscribers to the Ubuintu Weblogswill find his posts (along with mine). If you use audio on your Ubuntu system you should subscribe to Daniel Chen’s blog. I could just link to Daniel’s blog, but I’m going to let Mackenzie give you not only the link but more reasons to read his blog. It will also give you a chance to peruse some of her most excellent posts since I don’t link to every one of them.
Matt Zimmerman: Random Ubuntu sighting. You’d be surprised some of the places you can find an Ubunutu logo, like the place Matt found it. Martin Albisetti has found an Ubuntu user in a very interesting place.
Ubuntu QA blog: Totem & Rhythmbox Testing Day!One of the most important parts of getting a new version of Ubuntu ready to rock is the Testing Days where they focus on a particular part of Ubuntu and see what needs to be done for it. On 2 March they’ll look at two of the most popular media players in Ubuntu, so if you have a machine to spare, or some time to download and test a LiveCD, please consider joining the testers.
Jim Campbell: Xfce is released!Xfce is kind of the less voracious cousin to GNOME and the basis of Xubuntu. If your system can’t handle the demands of Ubuntu or Kubuntu, Xubuntu may be just what you’re looking for.
Vincent Untz: Getting the GNOME 2.26 release notes ready.Ubuntu 9.04 will use GNOME 2.26 and Vincent is making sure we can understand why it’s better than the current version.
I have a few more links but I’ll save those for another post. Have a most excellent weekend!
Tuesday’s links post included news that GNOME Do 0.8 has reached alpha stage and since then I found an easy way to get it. The GNOME Do team has added a new PPA on Launchpad for GNOME Do testers that will probably be the easiest way to get testing builds of GNOME Do 0.8 and keep them up to date. To get them you want to add these two lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-testers/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-testers/ubuntu intrepid main
Now update your package list with
sudo apt-get update
If you already have GNOME Do installed you should get a notification from the Update Manager that you have updates to install, but if you don’t have Do installed yet just run this from your terminal:
sudo apt-get install gnome-do
That will install not only GNOME Do but also the plugins as well. Once they’re installed you can simply run gnome-do to launch it.
But GNOME Do 0.8 can get silly in version 0.7.95.1 (the second alpha release of GNOME Do 0.8). I had an issue where none of my launchers were available in Do so I had to use my menus just to be able to run Synaptic or even Sonata, the two apps I run most often. I posted a question about it on the Do support thread on the Ubuntu Forums and davidsiegel was kind enough to promptly ask me to run gnome-do --debug and post the output. When I ran that I saw that a link that I had created to a post on the Ubuntu Forums was causing problems so I moved it to a folder away from my desktop, restarted Do and saw that I could once again launch apps from Do.
I did notice that the Do icon shows up in the notification tray regardless of what I had set in the preferences dialog, but someone had already filed a bug for it. There’s also a problem with the Files and Folders plugin, but I think what I’m seeing is covered by one of two bugs already filed.
There is one very cool thing I’m seeing in Do 0.8, and I found it when I was reading my RSS feeds the other day. When I set Do to use the Docky theme I saw this on the bottom of my screen:
Yes, Do is now available as a dock, but it’s nowhere near as configurable as something like AWN, which you may notice behind the Do dock. Go ahead and play with it, but if you need to figure out how to get Do back to another theme simply use your trigger keys (usually Super (aka the Windows key)+space) or click on the first icon to get Do ready for your input, then start typing GNOME Do Preferences. When it offers that option simply go into the Appearance tab and select a different theme. I’m really liking the Nouveau theme, myself, especially when I change the background color and opacity, as you can see on the right. It still needs some work, but this is good for now.
I do have sone suggestion for you. I’d stay away from the Read Help Documentation (man) plugin. When I enabled it I got options to read the manuals for several apps before getting anywhere near the launcher for the app I wanted to run.
Are you still writing “2008″? I caught myself writing the wrong year earlier today, so if you are doing it too don’t feel too bad.
I apologize for not posting much so far this year. We started the new year with my getting not only a new video card but having our router die and having to move to a wireless network here at home. I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to get Ubuntu to remember that I have a wireless USB “card” when I reboot but I’m still needing to open my AWN Terminal applet and run two commands as I get logged in after a reboot. I thought I had it fixed, but a reboot earlier today proved me wrong. I had some issues when I first installed my EVGA e-GeForce 6200 card but I think it may have had something to do with the fact that I forgot to disable the drivers for my current, very old, graphics card first. I was hoping to give the new graphics card another shot today but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. It’s now at the top of my list for tomorrow (after I check my email and news feeds, that is) so hopefully I will have some good news tomorrow afternoon.
Ana Beatriz Guerro Lopez: New year’s proposal: look at your reported bugs. This post from Planet Debian is a great idea. If you’ve filed a bug online anywhere you should check to make sure the information is current. Some bugs may no longer effect you, and some bugs may still need more information so the bug can get resolved. You should take a look at bugs no matter where they were filed or what they were filed against, which means I should take one more look at my open bugs on Bugzilla, even though I no longer use Thunderbird and I only keep Firefox around as an emergency backup in case something isn’t working quite properly with Epiphany.
Jorge Castro: Resolutions and mean people. Jorge found someone who was giving Ubuntu a test drive for a week. Jorge does have some responses to things the person is writing, but he says he’s glad to see things like that because it reminds us why we do things to support open source software.
Ubuntu Productivity: Best of both worlds .Geany, the text editor that so many of us love (it’s my preferred text editor of all sorts of plain-text tasks) is available for Linux and Windows, but not OSX. Jon Beebe found a way to get it installed on his other OS and he is kind enough to let us all know how he got it working with his favorite spotted kitteh.
Vincent Fourmond: Switching to mpd. Vincent has discovered one of the best parts of using MPD: it isn’t the resource hog that other media players can be. Vincent’s post is short on details, but I couldn’t help sharing the good news that another user has discovered my favorite audio player, even if he prefers using a command line interface rather than my personal favorite front end.
Felix Kaser: Announcing gnome-format 0.1.0. The GNOME devs are working on a new formatting tool for removable memory devices like memory cards and USB drives. Yes, Gparted handles that task already but gnome-format will be even easier to use.
DesktopLinux.com: Vietnam mandates open source for gov’t servers, desktops. The minister of information and communications for Vietnam has asked both national and local government IS workers to get all their users on open source software by the end of June. It seems a tad soon for the deadline, but he’s mandated that all government workers use open source software by 2010 in some of the best news in a while for proponents of open source software. I bet the boys and girls in Redmond are trying to figure out who let this happen.
Sven Muller: About Usability. Another resident of Planet Debian has a great post that I think you guys should read. Sven had seen a post by Sami Haahtinen about usability and while he agrees with most of what Sami wrote there’s one part he disagrees with. I don’t think I’ve ever read a better written post about making things easy not only easier for beginners but also keeping settings available for more advanced users. One of the problems I have with Epiphany is that several relatively easy tweaks I performed with Firefox are difficult, if not flat out impossible, with Epiphany thanks to the GNOME mindset of locking controls down and out of reach of users who could bork things royally by changing the wrong thing improperly.
There is one more bit of news I want to pass along. Back in June I started getting my Ubuntu-related posts syndicated on UbuntuWeblogs, also known as Planet Ubuntu Users. Tiago Faria, also known as Gouki, has added Ubuntu Universe, a new area on the UbuntuWeblogs, that will expand the posts of Ubutu bloggers syndicated to include non Ubuntu related posts. This means that if a person has their technical posts on Planet Ubuntu, UbuntuWeblogs or any of the Planet websites for the Ubuntu Local Community (LoCo) teams. Gouki and I sent emails back and forth this morning, and it looks like I have come up with a way to get all of my posts on the new Ubuntu Universe.
For those on WordPress.com blogs with other authors, like Nanci and I have here, I’ll share how we got the URI to submit. Have the owner of the blog go into the blog’s Appearance screen, and have them put up a widget that will let users see the articles posted by each author. Grab the link for your posts and simply add “/feeds” to the end of the URI. That should give you an RSS feed for only that author’s posts.
Everything’s going along nicely. One day (or session) you’re rocking along in Ubuntu Intrepid, playing music or video and having your computer play the system sounds when needed. Then all of a sudden your computer is silent. No system sounds. No music or soundtrack from videos. All you know is that you computer either got a bad case of laryngitis or something ran away or got abducted.
We’ve already solved the cases of the stubborn keypad, disappearing desktop effects, flavorless WINE, and the picture management problems, but this new case is one that has to be solved ASAP. The abductee, you see, is a member of a very prominent family and calls are being made to get this case solved quickly or else our next beat could be policing problems in Windows Me.
[title: 1 Hour Missing]
We’ve looked at the Volume Control applet, the Sound Preferences, the Help manuals, and everything else we can think of to try to find out what happened to the missing sound, only to mocked as we try to play an audio track of use the Test buttons on the Sound Preferences window. Now senators are calling asking why we haven’t closed the case yet. It’s time to expand the search and talk to witnesses around the forums and blogs to try to find someone who saw what happened.
[title: 90 Minutes Missing]
We found a group that supposedly had some information that would shed some light on the case. A person named Githlar had something similar happen, and we talked with psyke83, and they told us that there’s a known issue in Intrepid that causes the PCM audio channel to get muted. He suggested we check the alsamixer, but that didn’t do anything for us. The PCM channel is the main sound channel for things like system sounds and other audio content, so we had a feeling we were on to something.
Armed with a new clue we went back to the Volume Control and looked at the bottom of the PCM slider. Sure enough, the speaker symbol was missing (thanks to the light gray on gray color scheme of the Mac4Lin GTK theme, one of our few complaints about the theme), indicating it was muted. We clicked the invisible button and had the Sound Preferences window run a test for the Sound Events and heard the test tone.
We called up Sonata and asked it to play a track. Tears were shed as the very happy ears were able to hear music from the system once more. Another case solved, and once more example of a *.10 version of Ubuntu being more troublesome to use than *.04 versions.
Perhaps next fall I’ll have to stick with the Jackelope rather than take the “K”-named 9.10 version of Ubuntu. Although it would be nice to find out why the *.10 versions are so frequently troublesome.
[Roll credits, thanking Githlar and especially psyke83 for their assistance in solving the case.]
RSS - Posts
I know some of the articles are from late last month, but that’s how long I’ve been grabbing these links and I wanted to make sure you guys had seen them.
