Getting rid of PulseAudio

Found an excellent guide (in Swedish) to remove PulseAudio. Basically do this:

alsamixer
Check that your system uses Pulseaudio (it says clearly by Card and Chip) in the top left corner.

sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio
killall pulseaudio
sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install esound

Then run:
alsamixer
And check that it is not using PulseAudio any longer.

I will report after thorough testing if it works fine.

XBMC yes, as long as you get rid of PulseAudio

As I wrote in my earlier post about PulseAudio it doesn’t work to well with XBMC Media Center.

I have now been using XBMC quite a lot for a full week and have no problems what so ever, as long as PulseAudio is closed first.

sudo killall pulseaudio

As soon as I have a little more time I will investigate how a uninstall of PulseAudio could affect the system…

Network Manager only allows one vpn connection

Darn, today I got around to installning my second vpn which gave me more trouble than I asked for. I have been running my primary connection to my office for a while and it has been working flawlessly, it’s really, really nice to be able to manage stuff like this in the network manager.

The second vpn connection, to a datacenter at work is not working as well though. First I have some kind of routing problem – when this is connected I can’t access anything outside of the vpn-route

The explanation is in routing. But I didn’t succeed in fixing it in the network manager settings. Will try again when I have more time.

default * 0.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 tap0

The other thing that has pussled me is that I cannot activate both my vpn’s at the same time. First I thought it was a configuration misstake (since I have been using these two OpenVPN connections simultaneously on 8.04) but the I found this on Ubuntu Brainstorm. It seems to be a limit set in Network Manager. Bummer.

Should be easy to fix though, since it was working outside NM, hopefully someone with skillz will do that.

Ubuntu_restriced_extras.

Is probably one of the easiest fixes to get Ubuntu a lot more useful in one single step. It adds MS Fonts, Flash-plugin, Java RE, DVD Playback and MP3 support. Just get it.

Lovely network manager

Last week I was working at a clients site and had to configure my computer to use a static IP, netmask, gateway and special DNS-servers. The client has a very closed network and no DHCP what so ever, so apart from using a static ip-address I could only use their DNS-servers.

I just love the network-manager. Dunno if this is new functionality or if it has been there all the time but it isn’t harder than to right-click on the network manager and add another network. I always use the “Auto eth0″ connection, since it works at my office and at home. I was wondering for a while how this setting could conflict with my office settings.

No worries, when I got back to the office, and when I got home, it automagically used the “Auto eth0″ again. But more interesting was that when I got back a couple of days later it found the tailored connection again. I’m not sure how this was done, did network manager try it since it couldn’t get and DHCP or did it recognize the network in some other way? Works flawlessly for me anyway.

The network manager is my friend keeping track of my 5 regular wirless connections, my mobile broadband, my office vpn and also my wired connections in one place – it feels so good compared to what I was used to (which involved some rather ugly shell-scripts written by myself).

Getting the Synaptics touchpad to run smoothly

is something that requires some hacks in Ubuntu 8.10, and most of the information out there seems to be for earlier versions and will not help in getting gsynaptics up and running on Intrepid. This does work, tested by yours truly.

Start “Add/Remove applications and search after Touchpad. Install it.

Then fire up a command prompt and write:

gksudo gedit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi

and enter the following:

True

Save, reboot and try out touchpad under System – Preferences – Touchpad

More stuff and conf stolen from here. You really should read that page since it contains a lot more information regarding security and other possible configurations.

usb_modeswitch, network-manager and pccardctl

I think I’ve made an interesting discovery. Sometimes when I’m on the train I loose my connection. Getting it running again could prove diffucult, and, like today, even a reboot of the computer doesn’t really solve everything, since network-manager doesn’t find the 3G card even after I’ve executed usb_modeswitch.

The discovery is pccardctl, and not only that program as such, but that it shouldn’t be executed with sudo. If I do pccardctl seems to hang. So, when encountering problems that cannot be solved by “disconnect / connect” in network manager I think this is the way to go:
pccardctl eject

take out the card and insert it again.
pcardctl insert
sudo usb_modeswitch

Then connect through network-manager. I will test this furter as soon as I get a chance with a crashed connection.

Unstable programs in Intrepid

So for most things seem pretty stable, or as stable as you could expect them to be right now. The most annoying things I’ve found so far is:

Pidgin – Just disappears, no crash report or anything (haven’t had the time to go through the logs though).

Network-manager – the support for 3G cards seems flaky. I’ve been trying seriously to get two of my cards to work, both requiring some sort of switching (usb_modeswitch for one card and RDEVCHG for the other). While testing this I’ve experienced hard hangs, with the computer completetly unaccessible. After a hard reset on two occacions my system has refused to mount /home and to start GDM / Xwindows. Gotta get this to work, will give it another shot soon.

Another take on font rendering

Found on the Tombuntu bloghttp://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/10/15/tweak-your-font-rendering-for-better-appearance/

Tom describes ways of getting hinting to work by using the fonts.conf files – I wonder how this differs from my previous post about readability where I ran:

sudo ln -sf /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-autohint.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

Found from another blog (http://maketecheasier.com/how-to-achieve-nice-font-rendering-in-ubuntu-hardy/2008/09/19)

Will test when I get bored…

Improve readability in Ubuntu 8.10

I was trying to read a page and saw that the font rendering was terrible and hard to read. Found a partial solution here “How to Achieve Nice Font Rendering in Ubuntu Hardy“

It didn’t make the world a perfect place, but it certainly improved the readability as seen in the example below. In the first pic some letters are practically printed on each other, while in the second the spacing between characters has been notably improved.

Improve text rendering, hinting of fonts