sound problems

I’ve been having sound problems on Karmic for a while now. My audio is provided by an onboard Intel HDA ICH7 [8086:27d8]. I went through everything in:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebuggingSoundProblemsMisc

The only thing that fixes it (for just one song) is sudo alsa force-reload, which basically unloads and re-loads all related kernel modules. Will investigate further…

Notes:

1. cat /proc/asound/cards gives you a list of your sound cards
2. aplay -l does more-or-less the same
3. lsmod|grep snd lists the currently loaded kernel modules related to sound
4. lspci -vvnn|grep snd tells you which module actually controls your sound card (for me it’s snd-hda-intel)
5. look inside /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf for the options of the module above. for me they’re options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N

UPDATE: Removing this last line (so my sound doesn’t go to sleep anymore) seems to have fixed it, let’s see if it’s true.

dvi in evince

Two notes:

1. Evince needs texlive to render .dvi files
2. hlatex-fonts was replaced by ko.tex on 12.01.2009

image characteristics

To print the image characteristics of an image file (filetype, resolution, color depth, etc), run identify <file> (identify is part of the imagemagick package)

web crawling

Web crawling (for personal use only):

• wget -r <url>
• httrack <url> -O <path>

Httrack is slightly more intelligent in converting paths etc…

update-grub says /usr is broken

update-grub (which used to sit under /sbin) would tell me

“Your /usr is broken, please fix it before call this wrapper!”

I checked the contents of the script, and saw it would check for the existence of /usr/sbin/update-grub and run it, or if it wasn’t there exit with the above message.

Thanks to ubuntuforums thread #1052171 I found out that /usr/sbin/update-grub is contained in the package grub-pc. Installing it removed grub, then asked me a few questions. Now it works again…

ubuntu-docs

If you need to free up some disk space, ubuntu-docs takes up 237MB

apt-xapian-index

The quick-search box in Synaptic is greyed-out if you remove apt-xapian-index

xulrunner, firefox language support

When I launch Firefox, the Add-ons windows opens on the Languages tab. There I see 4 items:

1. Firefox (en-GB) 3.0.7 (Not compatible with Firefox 3.5.3)
2. Firefox (en-GB) 3.5.2
3. Xulrunner (en-GB) 1.9.0.8 (Not compatible with Firefox 3.5.3)
4. Xulrunner (en-GB) 1.9.1.2

Numbers 1 and 3 need to be removed. The files for 1. are under /usr/lib/firefox-addons/extensions/, while the files for 3. are under /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/extensions/

renew dhcp lease linux

To force a linux machine to renew its dhcp lease, just run sudo dhclient

shared-mime-info

Karmic recently upgraded the package shared-mime-info from 0.60-2 to 0.70-0ubuntu1. This package recognises the filetype of each file, so Gnome knows which program to open them with…

The problem is that after the upgrade, the mime database is messed up. The way to fix this is to run sudo update-mime-database /usr/share/mime