Acer, kubuntu and pulseaudio

So having got the sound to work on my Acer Aspire 8920 there was one small annoyance left and that is that I can only use one sound application at the time. It does not sound as a very bad thing, but its annoying. Like when i playing my game and someone sends me a msn message, kde tries to sound a audible warning or notification and I cant here then – all will pop up when the game closes down.

When reading about pulseaudio it seems to promise to solve all the problems, multiple applications and even individual volume controls for each application, so it seems promising. The only problem is that kde is not handling pulseaudio direct so there might be some work necessary to get the kde notifications going.

First thing ofcuase was to get the sound to work at all. Without ALSA working i dont think this would have succeeded at all. I did found 2 notes/links to information about how to do this so i followed that and added some things of my own.

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Queen on Fire at Hopley’s

Queen on Fire. Vilken show. Ja jag är i England och hälsar på min kolega Andrew. Och på lördagen var det en välgörnhetsföreställning på Hopley’s Garden Center till Ambulansflyget här i Heartfordshire i England. Det är lite ovant med att se att man måste samla in pengar till såna saker som vi i sverige tycker ska vara nåt som staten tillhandahåller men olika länder olika seder. Ja i alla fall så gjorde vi en picknick. Själva föreställningen startade kl 8:45 med ett förband kl 07:00. Insläppet var kl 6:30 så för att vara på plats och få bra platser så lärde vi oss av förra årets föreställning, och var där redan 6:40.

Vi startade med att ha picknick och andrew gick runt och pratade med alla som han kännde. Sen kom ett förband som hette Muttlys Grean eller nåt sånt och dm spelade en underlig blandning mellan modärnmusik med inslag av Ståkar eller Chello. Ganska kosntigt men det fördrev ju tiden lite. Det var också en del lotterier under tiden och dragningen skulel bli senare på kvällen.

Förra året så regnade det hela tiden så när vi komm tillbaka var jag helt genomsur. I år så var vädret ganska bra. Solen sken lite när allt startade och det var uppehåll till sista 5 minutrarna så det startade och regna lite. Inget farligt. Hela föreställning avslutades med ett fint fyrverkeri och trots att det regnade lite så var det jättebra.

Efter showen gick vi hem till andrew och tog det lite lungt.

Bilder/Images

Här kommer några bilder från kvällen.

Here are some images from the event at Hoppley’s.

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Wine version 1.1.2

So most of you know that I’m playing EVE-Online on my machine and have been doing that on my Linux since I moved over over a year ago now. And it has been interesting and more or less very good.

When moving over to the new machine i installed Wine version 0.9.58 as this version worked and had almost no bugs. I have been trying new versions on and off when they come out but so far I haven’t found a newer version that was OK and worked well. So I stayed on 0.9.58. I have the Premium Graphics working and I can run 2 clients at the same time without the machine being to tired.

I did lock the version with both the synaptic package manager (package >> lock version) to lock it for synaptic but I also had to do a dpkg command to lock the adept package manager:

This was necessary for me so that the automatic updater would NOT update wine, but it was complaining all the time that there was a new release out there.

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kubuntu and sound on a acer 8920

So its time to tackle the sound problem. When installing the Acer Aspier 8920 machine with Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron I had the problem that it did not find the network card right and it also did not find the soundcard. Well it found the soundcard ok, but none of the speakers where working. The USB headset I had did work.

So after some googeling and finding out that the card i have in the machine is a new Intel HDA card, a Realtek ALC889. Apparently Intel has done this new standard of soundcards for on the motherboard mounting and as usually with a new standard its implemented slightly different on different machines.

So I did not find any notion of how to solve the problem, but there was this post that said that you could solve the problem by installing OSS4 instead of ALSA. There was ofcause a lot of discussions for and against OSS and if ALSA is better or of OSS of free enough, but frankly I don’t care. I want my stuff to work. I need the audible notification from kopete when someone send me a message, and i need my VOIP softphones to work, prefably with the USB Headset. What does it and how it does it I could not care less about.

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Kubuntu, telenor, 3G card and kppp

So this is time to get the backup 3G network card to work now. I have an extra 3G network card as a backup if I get stranded somewhere without a network. This is also god when he broadband connection fails or so. So i need to get that working on my new acer aspire 8920g. The OS is kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron and my card is a telenor 3G card, made by Opteon and the model is ICON 7.2.

This is one of the new #G modems that behaves like a USB stick at first when you enter it as it has the drivers and stuff for windows on that. The driver the sends a command to the device to switch to Modem moden and can then use it for the connection.

This is ofcuase a small problem for us LInux users as linux will se the device as a USB stick and the drives there is ofcuase not any use to us linux users.

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Mysql, amarok and ipod – Moving over part 4

So it is time to get the last bits over from the old machine. To make the search indexes happy the new machine is an acer aspire 8920g, OS is kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron and my ipod is and apple ipod video 60 gb and i think they say its a iPod (5th generation).

As a lot of you know I have had some change in my personal life, so I did this work the 1:th but haven’t had time to publish it. So thats why the date is perhapes a bit missleading.

I think now its 3 major things I need to get over:

  • amarok and my music and connection to my ipod.
  • my palm and syncing the palm
  • the mobile network setting is have as a backup if networks fails.

And today we will do the amarok.

Amarok is the preferred music program that plays my mp3’s and more important it handles all my pod casts and downloads them and transfers them to my ipod. So the first thing is to get Amarok going. But to get that going I have to get the mysql databases over from the old machine.

I have already transferred over all my music collection. But amarok keeps the podcast in its own directory. And it also uses mysql and a database for ll the music collection data. Well amarok can be configured in a number fo ways but as I am using the mysql-database for other things I can as well use it for amarok.

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