Robert Beal

Change the default sound card in Ubuntu Karmic

// April 20th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Linux

I’ve got a pc with two sound cards, the onboard sound, and a Sound Blaster Live Value I’ve had for a while. I use the Sound Blaster as I’ve never been able to get the onboard sound working in Ubuntu. For some reason or other, I managed to mess up the default sound card on my install of Ubuntu Karmic. Sound would work for most apps, but wouldn’t work for Flash (such as Youtube). Most of the apps were going through PulseAudio, and working fine. Flash however was still using Alsa directly and was using the wrong sound card by default, hence no sound.

So, I set about trying to fix the issue, but it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t an easy fix. There used to be an app called “asound” which would let you configure this sort of thing. But since Karmic it has been dropped from the repo’s! So I found a different way of fixing the issue.

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Setting up mediatomb in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic)

// March 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Linux

Having recently bought a WDTV HD Live to replace my Xbox (with XBMC) I decided to look into setting up a UPnP service on my Ubuntu headless server.

After reading around a bit, I firstly tried uShare but didn’t find it very flexible. I finally settled on MediaTomb as I liked the look of the JavaScript import scripts that can be written. I started getting setup so checked out the MediaTomb wiki and a few online tutorials, but struggled to get MediaTomb to work. Either I had missed something, or the articles weren’t 100% clear. Here are the steps I took to get it working…

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Rebuilding Grub2 grub.cfg from Ubuntu Live CD

// January 1st, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Linux

After installing Windows 7 the other day I lost my Grub install. Not a problem, in the past I’ve used my Super Grub Disc to repair it.

This didn’t work for me though (may be my disc is a bit date, or maybe it doesn’t support grub 2 just yet). Instead I booted up using my Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD. I could easily re-install grub using the “grub-install” command.

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Power Saving in Ubuntu for the Dell M1330

// February 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // Linux

Recently I was feeling sort of green, but mainly annoyed from having to plug my laptop in all the time when its juice starts running low. So I thought I’d set about increasing the battery life. My previous experience was mainly to run powertop (a handy Linux app that will advise you on improvements to make). Here’s a little more on the subject and a few things I came across.

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Goodbye FreeNAS, Hello Ubuntu Server

// September 12th, 2008 // 13 Comments » // Linux

I’ve finally given up on FreeNAS. What was initially a great and simple system has turned out to be quite problematic. The two show stoppers for me where:

1. The hard drives, either went missing, wouldn’t mount, would sometimes mount, then later fail. It was completely random, and the error log would literally say “error mounting”, nothing more. This isn’t very helpful for diagnosing the problem.
2. It wouldn’t shut down properly. It was more of a reboot in that it would power up again! It worked initially but then would randomly stop working. I’ve no idea why.

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