Audigy stops working in Ubuntu

For some reason my Audigy sound card wasn't working. Well, it was working but no sound was coming out. I could see that Ubuntu found the hardware but it was muted. Anyway, I think this is what fixed it.

If these files exist, do this...
# cd ~
# mv .asoundrc .asoundrc.bak
# mv .asoundrc.asoundconf .asoundrc.asoundconf.bak

Then list your installed sound cards
# asoundconf list

Then finally..
# asoundconf set-default-card

If none of that works, then check out this thread for more info:
link: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=418360

Linksys WPC54G on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

First of all, I have say.. after months of not being able to make this work, this one post I happened to stumble across finally got me up and running. So to whoever wrote this,.. thanks.

link: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=185650

Now I'm going to document this here to just to make sure I don't lose this info. =)


First, install this firmware cutter tool. The x's aren't variables by the way,.. That is the actual name of the program you are installing. Just copy paste the line into your terminal.
# sudo apt-get install bcm43xx-fwcutter

Next, you should find a good version of the 'bcmwl5.sys' file. I just downloaded the closest match of drivers I could find for my card from the Linksys website and used the file from that. Anyway, once you have it,.. do this..
# bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware/ /path/to/bcmwl5.sys

Of course to get your kernel version you can just do this
# uname -a

Death Angel!

So uh,.. yeah. Went and saw Death Angel live tonight. I haven't been to a concert in a long long time. The first time I saw Death Angel was in San Francisco in the late 80's when I was just about 18 years old. Wow!





Saw them at The Blank Club. I highly recommend this place! Check it out!

Hooray! I have Ubuntu 7.04 installed at home now

Great! Just installed it both at work and at home today. Here's a screenshot!


...

Ubuntu: Change Gnome panel text to white

You have Ubuntu installed, you changed your panel to transparent but you can't read any text in the panel because it is black and doesn't contrast against your latest and greatest wallpaper. If so, then do this...

Note: I got this idea from another site but I can't remember from where. Anyway...


First, create a file.. (and yes, there is a dot in front of the gtkrc-2.0 so that it will be a hidden file)
# gedit .gtkrc-2.0

Next, paste this text (below) into this new file and then save it (in your home directory)

style "panel"
{
fg[NORMAL] = "#ffffff"
# fg[PRELIGHT] = "#000000"
# fg[ACTIVE] = "#ffffff"
# fg[SELECTED] = "#000000"
# fg[INSENSITIVE] = "#8A857C"
# bg[NORMAL] = "#000000"
# bg[PRELIGHT] = "#dfdfdf"
# bg[ACTIVE] = "#D0D0D0"
# bg[SELECTED] = "#D8BB75"
# bg[INSENSITIVE] = "#EFEFEF"
# base[NORMAL] = "#ffffff"
# base[PRELIGHT] = "#EFEFEF"
# base[ACTIVE] = "#D0D0D0"
# base[SELECTED] = "#DAB566"
# base[INSENSITIVE] = "#E8E8E8"
# text[NORMAL] = "#161616"
# text[PRELIGHT] = "#000000"
# text[ACTIVE] = "#000000"
# text[SELECTED] = "#ffffff"
# text[INSENSITIVE] = "#8A857C"
}
widget "*PanelWidget*" style "panel"
widget "*PanelApplet*" style "panel"
class "*Panel*" style "panel"
widget_class "*Mail*" style "panel"
class "*notif*" style "panel"
class "*Notif*" style "panel"
class "*Tray*" style "panel"
class "*tray*" style "panel"

Then do this to reset your gnome environment
# killall gnome-panel

By now the deed should be done. If for some reason it doesn't work, then just do this.
# sudo apt-get install gcolor2
# killall gnome-panel

If it still doesn't work, then too bad. It worked for me.

Greatest Living American

This is my contribution to the Stephen Colbert "Greatest Living American" google bomb movement. Ding!

Stephen Colbert = Greatest Living American

Watch Your Network Play Space Invaders

April 10 2007
Watch Your Network Play Space Invaders
Nick Gonzalez
12 comments »

NetQoS has a little something to bring video game-style drama to the hum drum task of monitoring your system traffic. Their program, Netcosm monitors the traffic flowing across your routers and remasters that data into entertaining clashes of good and evil data packets like the one you see above. The only question is whether your system admin with find it more entertaining to see your system get “Slashdotted” than do anything about it.

Netcosm is a product of NetQoS Performance Labs and currently only running on their servers, but they do have a nifty FAQ where you can ask them about all the fun they’re having.

Vote for Sanjaya!

http://www.votefortheworst.com + (http://www.sirius.com + http://www.howardstern.com) * The Howard Stern audience = Sanjaya,.. the new American Idol! LOL!!

Sanjaya's `Idol' run not India's fault

Thu Apr 5, 10:10 AM ET

NEW DELHI - So much for the Indian Call Center Theory: Under-talented singer Sanjaya Malakar's unlikely wave of "American Idol" support apparently isn't coming from his father's homeland.
ADVERTISEMENT

Indians are usually attuned to the successes of their compatriots abroad. But apart from a few brief newspaper articles, at least one short TV news segment and a few blog mentions, the reedy 17-year-old with the unsteady voice is a virtual unknown here.

One reason is that the show is broadcast a day late in India, and on an English-language channel that attracts relatively few viewers in this country of 1.1 billion.

"He's also an object of ridicule," said Amit Varma, who runs the popular India Uncut blog.

Malakar's success with viewers, who vote by phone or text message for their favorite performers, has come despite withering criticism from the three "Idol" judges on New Corp.'s hit Fox network show. The irascible Simon Cowell has even threatened to quit if the native of Federal Way, Wash., wins the contest.

Malakar survived elimination Wednesday night to make it to the final eight. If he can hold on for a few more weeks, he might see his fame spread here, Varma said.

"Even if the guy's really an American, it will be projected by the media here as an Indian doing well in the world," he said. "They'll make a big deal about it."

As for the theory that Indian call center operators are phoning in votes for Malakar: Most workers have calls automatically dialed for them by computers. They couldn't even call next door if they wanted to.

The birth of ARPANET

In October 1972 Kahn organized a large, very successful demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC). This was the first public demonstration of this new network technology to the public. It was also in 1972 that the initial "hot" application, electronic mail, was introduced. In March Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote the basic email message send and read software, motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easy coordination mechanism. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. From there email took off as the largest network application for over a decade. This was a harbinger of the kind of activity we see on the World Wide Web today, namely, the enormous growth of all kinds of "people-to-people" traffic.

http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml

Uninstall Fedora Linux from Windows Multi-Boot PC

So you have a Windows computer with some extra disk space on it and you decided to install Linux on that extra space. So you used Partition Magic, created some unallocated space, installed Fedora Core 6 and now you are on your way. But then months later you think,.. "Hey, I want to ditch Fedora and go with Ubuntu". So you wipe the Linux partition and now you can't boot into Windows because the grub boot loader is now gone. Well, here's a clean, proper way to deal with this in the future.

First of all, you should consult the Microsoft Knowledge Base article #307654.

link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307654

Ok, so if you follow through that MSKB article, you will see that you will install the MS recovery console.

1> From Start> Run.. :
d:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons where d is the drive letter for the CD-ROM drive.

2> Reboot, and you will get an option to enter the Recovery Console

3> Once you are in, you will have to enter your local Administrator password. This will bring you to the C:\WINDOWS prompt. From there just enter "fixmbr" (without quotes), hit enter and then reboot again when prompted.

If all that goes well then your master boot record should be restored. Now you can format your Linux partitions and install Ubunut. Enjoy!

Sun's Solaris success paves way for next-gen OS push

By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View (ashlee.vance@theregister.co.uk)Published Monday 2nd April 2007 22:21 GMT

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz loves to splatter the media with the line that Windows, Red Hat Linux and Solaris stand as the only operating systems of significance in the server kingdom. We've spent the last few years struggling to appreciate the seriousness of that claim. Sun's declining system sales failed to inspire much optimism about the company conquering the data centers of tomorrow with a deflating “venerable” OS.

A couple of recent items, however, have tweaked our view of Schwartz's favored claim. It could well be that Solaris – of all things – provides the “iPod moment” Sun seeks.

Schwartz's justification for placing Solaris alongside Windows and Red Hat remains understandable enough. Sun has a gigantic customer base, immense ISV support and emphasizes its version of Unix far more than rivals such as IBM and HP. In addition, Sun spends a great deal of time courting developers and often includes Solaris angles in its various programs and applications aimed at coders.

For Solaris to “matter” in the sense that Schwartz uses the word, the OS must match Windows and Red Hat on forward looking terms – not a backward facing metric such as the installed base. Regrettably for Sun, Solaris suffers when analysts and customers make such “2010” comparisons.

For one, the Unix server market continues to shrink by most measures, while the Windows and Linux server markets grow at healthy rates. ISVs, customers and resellers all notice this trend and so divert their attention to the money making opportunities linked to Windows and Linux.
Linux enjoys an added bonus over both Solaris and Windows with its open reputation and backing from a wide variety of vendors. The open source OS benefits from healthy developer interest and diverse investment. Red Hat may dominate server-side Linux, but that does little to cramp the OS's communal cachet.

Schwartz, in particular, has tried to counter these issues facing Solaris, during his rise through Sun's ranks. He helped revitalize the x86 version of Solaris and then open-sourced the OS. Sun hoped that such maneuvers would break Solaris's ties to SPARC processors and create a developer frenzy of sorts with coders of all shapes and sizes hoping to explore the glories of the freshly released Solaris 10.

Where Sun bought into these hopes and dreams wholesale, we remained skeptical. Old Solaris x86 backers such as HP (Compaq, really) turned their back on the OS's Intel/AMD rebirth. Meanwhile, developer interest in OpenSolaris looked decent enough but few would confuse such contained enthusiasm with the industry-wide Linux obsession.

SPARC SCHMARKThrough sheer persistence and substantial foresight, Sun may actually be eroding Solaris's “proprietary Unix” baggage, giving critics a reason to believe that the company has another turnaround in store.

For one, Sun's rivals have given up on knocking Solaris x86 in favor of, um, selling it. HP executives have recently been caught bragging about selling more x86 boxes running Solaris than Sun. HP also offers broad support for Solaris on x86 servers and even dishes out statements to customers celebrating this fact. Add IBM's tie-up with Sun around Solaris on x86 blades, and you have to give some credit to the Lazarus Edition of Sun's OS.

HP likes to bill the Solaris x86 push as a way of bringing disgruntled Solaris/SPARC types to its side. We figure that's just fine with Sun who would rather see a SPARC defector stay on Solaris than move to another OS running on x86 chips.

The OpenSolaris ploy appears to have gained (http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/marketing/metrics/latest/) momentum as well with activity on the project's web site (http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/resource/110106-17-months-conversations.jpg) skyrocketing in recent months.

On both of these fronts, Solaris has gained that crucial freshness factor missing when Schwartz first started hammering away on the three OSes that matter campaign.
The Solaris revival becomes even more interesting as we look out to 2010, if our sources are to be believed.

iSolarisFor many months now, a crack team of Sun software engineers have beavered away on a secret project to create the “Solaris of the future.”

Refined details on this effort remain very slim, but we know that Sun's lead kernel engineer – and one of its top brains – Bryan Cantrill has been backing the project. In a recent blog post, Cantrill hinted that his team “is close talking about what we've been up to for the past year.”

Sun's CTO and R&D chief Greg Papadopoulos ordered the work on this software job, which, as we understand it, will result in an OS designed to power massive data centers. Yes, such operating systems perform this function today, but Sun's latest creation is said to be taking OS scaling to a new level.

Complementing this software work, Sun has started looking for ways to push Solaris deeper into the data center – namely the networking layer. Our sources have revealed that Sun hopes to woo Cisco as a long-term partner around this new flavor of Solaris.
Pipe dreams? Perhaps.

At the same time, it's hard to imagine any other company pulling off this type of OS planning.

Microsoft's release of Vista confirms that the company has no intention of innovating on the OS front anytime soon. God forbid, we depend on Red Hat and the open source army to craft a solid, usable OS of the future in a timely fashion. And neither IBM nor HP have demonstrated any interest in pushing their versions of Unix in new and interesting directions.

Plenty of start-ups crank away on file systems, specialized OSes and other virtualized applications that may do something similar to Sun. These companies, however, fail to have the reach or reputation needed to usher in something broad and spectacular in the server OS game.
Even Sun's staunchest critics – those who wonder how the company makes money off Java – would allow the vendor a unique position of prominence, if it can show broad, vibrant interest in Solaris.

The OS does not carry the razzle-dazzle of a new server based on a fresh multi-core chip. Nor do financial analysts translate software downloads into profits as easily as they do hardware shipments.

More savvy types, however, will see that Sun owes its resurgence to Solaris 10 as much as anything else. And a really dramatic turnaround – where Sun cranks up revenue by the billions – will only occur if Sun can maintain and then grow current interest in its venerable OS.
Luckily for Sun, such a Solaris revival now seems like a possibility. ®

Bumblebee

How to Add Picture to Beta Blogger Header

This is a great article, I highly recommend it. Just click on the title.