Ubuntu - issues resolved

Posted 22:07, 5/11/2007, in Ubuntu

I managed to fix quite a few of my remaining 'niggles' with Ubuntu today after 20 mins or so of Googling. So here are the problems and solutions incase they help anyone else:

Lack of 5.1 surround (Realtek AC'97)

Here's the contents of my .asoundrc config file (which I setup last time I was trying to fix this):

pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "surround51"
    slave.channels 6
    route_policy duplicate
}

but I was still only getting sound from the front two speakers. The solution? Type alsamixer into a console window - this will give you an ascii volume control for each channel. Crank up the rear speakers (the volume of which was defaulted to 0), and voila.

A nice sound configuration GUI is one thing that Ubuntu lacks.

No flash player (64-bit related)

As I understand it, Adobe don't do a 64-bit version of their flash player, so I have been using the open source (but limited) 'gnash' player up until now. However
in Gutsy, you can now install the normal 32-bit flash player package (flashplayer-nonfree), as this will also automatically install a package called nspluginwrapper, which allows 32-bit plugins to work in 64-bit Firefox. Simple!

Add comment

Or login with OpenID

Search this site
Login
(or login/signup the old fashioned way)
Elsewhere

External URLs/articles that may be of interest:

PHP - Architecture, Scalability, and Security

Slides from Rasmus' OSCON talk, once again some interesting ways of tweaking server performance to get the most out of PHP apps.

New Rails documentation site

Lack of a decent manual has always been a big problem for Rails (an API reference is not a manual!) A number of projects have sprung up in the last year or so trying to make up for this, this new one is the best I've seen so far, so hopefully it will gain some traction.

bbc.co.uk moving to Zend Framework

The BBC are updating their perl/SSI based backend to a platform using Java for the backend and Zend Framework for the frontend.

Stock image search engine

Free text search for a number of different stock photo sites, results include thumbnails, dimensions and license info. The advanced search option allows you to, among other things, restrict results to only photos with a particular license (e.g. "public domain").