Peng’s links for Friday, 15 January

Damn, it’s been a while since I got a links post written. I was checking the things I flagged as wanting to post and I found 69 items going back to 18 December. Yikes!

I won’t go that far back, but I do have some things from late last year that I still want to make sure you all have seen. I’ll try not to let this post get too Jabba-sized.

• Artem Nosulchik: Best of Linux Cheat Sheets. Artem (aka artiomix) has compiled a great list of Linux cheat sheets that are great for everyone from GNU/Linux noobs to folks who gurus. He posted this article back before Chrismukkuh, but info like this is (almost) never outdated.
• Scott Ritchie: The future of Wine sound. If you’ve tried running apps under WINE that uses sound you know it’s definitely not an elegant solution. Scott shows not only why it’s so difficult to get sound working in WINE but also gives us a look at how they are trying to resolve the issue.
• Aaron Toponce: The Meaning of ‘su’. If you’ve done much work in GNU/Linux on the command line you’ve come across su, as well as it’s cousin sudo. If you’ve ever wondered what the hell su/sudo means then Aaron has your answer.
• Alan Pope: Ubuntu Spotted on Doctor Who Set. That’s right, Alan has found one of our favorite GNU/Linux distros on the set of the BBC series featuring our favorite Gallifreyan. Alas, the video he mentions is only available in the UK, but if anyone knows of a URI where those of us on the opposite side of the Pond can see it please leave it in the comments.
• Aaron Toponce: How Travelers Can Protect Their Data. Yes, Aaron posted this a lot closer to the start of the new year but if you do any traveling with your computer then you need to read his article.
• Peter Eisentraut: Remove and Purge. The package manager that Debian (as well as the *ubuntu family of distros) uses makes a difference between removing a package and purging it. The difference is an important one, and Peter wrote a great piece not only about the difference but why it’s important.
• Ubuntu Screencasts: Ubuntu Release Schedule. Edgy Eft? Intrepid Ibex? Jaunty Jackalope? Mads Rosendahl has made a screencast to explain the numbers and names of the various versions of Ubuntu. This one went straight to my E100 four days ago and hasn’t been removed yet. It’s that good.
• Martin Owens: Ubuntu Manual Project. This project is working on a guide to new users of Ubuntu 9.10, and they’re even going to make it available under a Creative Commons license. Martin has written a follow-up post looking at the differences between having a Manual or simply having docs.

This brings me up to earlier this week, and I need to start dinner. Hopefully I can get the rest of the items posted tomorrow. I had some problems this week with my ‘net connections dying, both wired and wireless with neither warning or any good way to fix them, but today we powered down our comps and reset the router and that seems to have done the job. In case I get delayed again, I hope everyone has a great weekend.

Does your MPD refuse to talk to your speakers?

In the process of doing some hardware upgrades here on Friday our router decided it was time to bite the dust, and after doing so many software installations and removal I decided to reinstall Ubuntu Hardy, get everything working again, and then upgrade to Intrepid. In the process of replacing our router we decided it was time to go wireless. My roomies still use Windows XP so there weren’t any issues on their end, but I wanted to make sure the wireless connection for my computer is one that Ubuntu will play with fairly easily. We decided on the Linksys WUSB600N Dual-Band Wireless-N USB Network Adapter, mostly because I had already seen a thread on the Ubuntu Forums about getting it installed.

That thread told me exactly what I needed to do, and mizunoX was kind enough to provide a .tar file for us to use in building the needed driver, as well as instructions for getting Ubuntu to get on the wireless ‘net automatically on each boot. I haven’t tried it yet to know if I’ll still have issues, but I’m seeing that it worked for others, and I may need to recompile the driver when I upgrade to Intrepid, but I have the info handy in case I do.

But I had one other issue that bugged the living daylights out of me. I rely on the combination of MPD and Sonata for most of my music listening and no matter what I did I couldn’t hear the tunes Sonata and MPD were playing. After uninstalling and reinstalling a few times and looking all over the place for a solution to my issue, all to no avail. I even found a configuration file that didn’t quite fix my issue, although it was a great help once I changed all of the paths to match my system and created a few more files and directories, but I still couldn’t hear a damned thing from MPD. That is until this morning.

This morning I discovered bug #192735 “mpd no access to soundcard using pulseaudio” on Launchpad, and comment 7 had one thing I hadn’t tried yet. (I’m not quoting the entire comment so you may want to go read the whole of what Josh Smith wrote.)

…

if you run mpd as a user, with settings:

user “ubuntu”

audio_output {
type “pulse”
driver “esd”
options “host=localhost”
name “esd”
}

…

I opened up my /etc/mpd.conf as root in my text editor and made those edits, other than setting the user as “ubuntu” because I just saw that line as I was writing this post. In a Terminal window I ran sudo /etc/init.d/mpd restart, then started Sonata and played a track. Finally I was able to hear music from MPD and Sonata.

I still have a few things I want to check before I make the upgrade to Intrepid again and install the video card I bought on Friday, but I’m holding off on those time consuming tasks until I blog some links I found over the weekend.

Silence from the System

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.

[Cue theme for Without a Trace]

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.]

Torley rolls out a new Tip of the Week, but not to the SL blog

I love Torley Linden’s Second Life Tip of the Week videos, but the devs are working on the site so he can’t post to it yet. Here’s Torley’s explanation of why it’s on his blog rather than on the SL blog.

If you’re wondering why this is on my personal blog instead of the official Second Life Blog and why you haven’t seen the KB Article of the Week lately either, it’s because Linden Lab is undergoing changes in communication policy and preparing for future improvements.

As much as that doesn’t seem to make sense, I can’t go into details now, and I would’ve let you know earlier were it not for events beyond my control. Please pardon me, I promise to share more if/when I can do so. In the meantime, if you have ideas for how I can better help you by making video tutorials broadly visible in places I’ve missed, let me know!

Awww! But this week’s video tip is a cool one, so I wanted to make sure you guys knew about it. This week’s video tip is about Custom Collision Sounds in SecondLife. That’s so cool I’m going to have to play with it one day.

In case you missed last week’s tip on reporting abuse, you should definitely check it out. I meant to blog it but RL got in the way.

Don’t forget, if you miss any of Torley’s tip videos you can see them again in the SL wiki, and you can always download high quality versions of the tips so you can always have them on your hard drive for the next time you want to refer to them.

Why the Search tool is your friend

I’m helping test beta versions of Firefox 3 and I’m looking at helping test either alpha or beta versions of Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” and I’m amazed at how many times I see a new thread or a new bug report that duplicates one that already existed. Or even worse, how many comments keep getting added to a bug after the devs say “It’s a known issue. We’re working on it.”

For the love of God, people, if you want to help test software it’s not enough to want to report issues you find. Before you start posting the issue see if it’s already reported.