Daniel's thoughts about this and that

Har haft problem med ljudet i Kubuntu av och till. Ibland har en restart av systemet fungerat andra gånger har det inte hjälpt. Ett felmeddelande som jag får i t.ex. mplayer är:

AO: [pulse] Failed to connect to server: Connection refused

men som sedan byter till alsa utan några felmeddelanden, men inget ljud hörs.

Att använda...

sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart

... hjälpte inte, men hittade till slut något som löste problemet...

sudo /sbin/alsa force-reload

Om du har samma problem kan du testa det men märk att force-reload kommer att döda alla processer som använder sig av ljudet.

Innan jag åkte på semester för några veckor sedan spillde jag juice i tangentbordet så det slutade att fungera. Så jag bestaällde ett nytt. Jag använder ett Cordless Desktop® Comfort Laser (split typ) vilket jag har vant mig vid och använt i ca 10 år nu.

En nackdel dock är att de bara säljer dessa tangentbord tillsammans med mus och nu när det bara var tangentbordet det var fel på känns det ju lite meningslöst att betala för en mus också. Det enda alternativet jag hittade var att man kunde köpa en äldre variant som inte är trådlöst utan mus, men då bara i 5-pack. Jag sliter ju inte ut dem så fort att jag behöver ett 5-pack :-)

Jag passade i alla fall på att skaffa mig ett extra 1GB minne till datorn när jag ändå beställde över nätet. Har inte haft koll på minnepriserna den senaste tiden så jag var lite överraskad att det bara kostade 150 kr. Jag installerade minnet och startade upp datorn i Kubuntu (en linuxdistribution) och allt fungerade fint. När jag senare testade att starta Vista (har dual-boot) så fick jag blåskärm direkt :-(.

Efter några timmars testade med memtest, runtflyttande av minnebrickorna och bios uppdatering så fungerade det till slut, men Vista känns ganska kasst, det är inte första gången jag får blåskärm. Dessutom är ljudet inte som det ska, det knäpper och sprakar av och till i högtalarna, men på linux har jag inte de problemen. Tyvärr så har jag några program jag gillar i windows så jag fortsätter att använda det av och till trots allt. Men det extra minnet gjorde i varje fall ganska stor skillnad.

Dessutom skaffade jag mig en mirror raid att lagra mina foton på.

Uppdatering: Ugh nej windows crashar fortfarande . Får nog klara mig utan det extra minnet...

Because of a broken hard disk I recently reinstalled my os on my laptop. Lately I have mostly used Kubuntu, but as I have that already installed on several computers I decided try something else. As I was a SUSE user for some years I decided to install that again and see how it looked now. So I installed OpenSUSE 10.3, and it looked nice and Compiz worked fine even though it was a bit hard to find out how to actually enable it. Seems strange as this was one the new things with 10.3. However I prefer the package installation in Kubuntu as it's faster. For some reason it seems to be much slower to start up compared adept or (apt-get update). Anyway the difference seems not big and everything on my laptop was found correctly by SUSE, I did not have to set up anything. So I am probably going to keep SUSE here and continue to use Kubuntu on my other computers, it's nice to have something to compare.

As a summmary my linux usage and distribution history looks like this:

1998 I first tried Linux and I used Red Hat 5.1. Things were not as easy then and I remember I had to tweak a lot in the configuration files and look for hours on the net to try to solve simple problems, but I thought it was fun and in the long run you learned a lot.

Later in 2000 if I recall correctly I switched to SUSE and kept using it until around 2003 (versions 6.4 to 8.x), after that I used Fedora Core for about a year when I switched to Kubuntu 5.04. The versions and years might not be exactly what I just said, but approximately.

So next year I have used Linux for 10 years :-) , I have mostly used KDE as window manager but I have also used FVWM for some years.

Now there is work ongoing for KDE 4 and I tried KDE 4 Beta 4 on a SUSE Live CD today. But I was a bit dissapointed, I found bugs in almost everything I tried to do. It looks nice but right now it felt more like an alpha release than a beta.

As I have had Linux as my main operating system for many years now that is the os that I am mostly used with. Now with my new computer I got vista preinstalled so I thought I should try it for a while ( about a month now ). So this is just my first impressions:

I thought it looked quite nice. Not a big revolution but it used these small effects that was not too much in the way.

Secondly I was rather annoyed by all questions about administrator rights all the time. It's supposed to increse the security but basically I felt these messages popped up so often that I am probably going to develop a spinal reflex to click them away faster than I even read what the messages are about. Maybe you can change this behaviour somewhere I have not really looked into it that much yet. On Linux you need admin rights too sometimes but I feel that on vista it's vista that asks me about administrator rights while on linux it's me that asks the computer instead.

Thirdly the stability is very disappointing so far, programs have been crashing here and there (even the task manager itself crashed when I was supposed to use it to close another program that had freezed) and in the past month I have had 4 blue screens. I thought they were a thing of the past, but apparantly they are as common as the last time I was a frequent windows user arount the time of Windows 98 if I recall correctly.

On the good side there is some things on that works better out of the box on vista than my latest Kubuntu installation like videos and some other stuff.

And I have not yet any sound on Linux, because the new soundcard was apparantly "noy yet" supported. Maybe I can steal my old soundblaster live card from the old computer if I do not find any other solution.

If you use Linux and compile some packages from sources I would like to recommend a solution I have been using for a couple of years that make it really easy to install and uninstall packages.

There is a small utility called epkg that can be downloaded from here.

Every time you now build a package you add the option "--prefix=/usr/local/encap/packagename" to the "configure" script. When running "make install" the package will now be installed to this specific location. Now comes the magic, you run "epkg -i packagename" and symlinks will be installed in the system locations for this package to the installed package in the encap directory. You easily uninstall the package later by running "epkg -r packagename" and the symlinks are removed (but package is still located in the encap directory). Using this system you can easily try out different versions of one package for example and you don't need to keep track of where you originally built the package from just to be able to uninstall things.

Additional note:

I usually get a problem with an error message "! man: not an Encap link" when trying to install encap from source. The solution is to configure encap to use another man directory like this:

./configure --mandir=/usr/share/man

and after this run "make install".