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I always manage to bugger up my settings so that CompizFusion won’t start correctly on log-in, and drops back to MetaCity. I think it’s to do with the gconf settings, and although I could nuke the ~/.gconf folder, I’m not sure if this entirely works (will try again just prior to 9.10 install at end of month!).

Anyway, I fix it by putting a script with a delay into my Startup Applications setup to start Compiz and use the Emerald window manager as follows:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 5
compiz --replace &
sleep 5
emerald --replace

Fixes things 99% of the time to boot cleanly into Compiz, though about 1% of the time it doesn’t. Who knows what the hell’s going on…

I un-installed ALSA and re-installed a diff version the other day, and somehow managed to lose sound in totem (i.e. movie player) in Ubuntu 9.04. Sound and video was fine in VLC (VideoLan), music played fine in RhythmBox… just no music or sound to avi’s in totem. Anyways, fixed it tonight – here’s how:

Run gstreamer-properties and change your audiosink to ALSA (assuming you’re using ALSA) or whatever you plan on using that works in other apps like this:

Then, open up gconf-editor and change the keys shown in the pic below to alsasink from whatever bastardised string it’s currently at:

And if all that doesn’t work (which it did for me) – try getting totem-xine or using VLC instead

Comments always welcome if this does/doesn’t work for you.

Open Office 3.1 is out with much new goodness, and I don’t want to have to wait for it to make its way to the standard repositories or add any 3rd party repos to my sources.list plus the repo keys, so I’m just gonna go with the debs. Here’s how:

1.) Remove/Purge the current version of Open Office from your system however you see fit. Synaptic Package Manager would do it.

2.) Get yourself an appropriate Open Office 3.1 package in .deb format (i.e. for 64 Bit Linux I’ve grabbed the OOo_3.1.0_LinuxX86-64_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz file from here)

2.) Extract the downloaded package somewhere and navigate to it in a bash terminal/console

3.) In the terminal, go into the DEBS sub-folder in wherever you extracted Open Office and run:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

4.) Once that’s installed, go into the desktop-integration folder and run sudo dpkg -i *.deb again there to install the menu shortcuts.

Tap-tap. Job done.

PrintScreen key not taking a screengrab? Alt+PrintScreen not capturing the window? Using Gnome? And Compiz? – Fix it thus:

Right click on the Compiz-Fusion Icon (Don’t have? Install directions here), then right-click on the Compiz Fusion Icon and select Settings Manager, then from the settings window that opens find Gnome Compatibility under the General section and enable it by clicking the tick-box.

Ching!

Just upgraded my 8.10 Intrepid Ibex Ubuntu distro to 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, and bar a slight keyboard configuration issue (paraphrased as: “current layout not found – will leave keyboard config alone”) and having to take a close look at my GRUB menu.lst before deciding to take the package maintainers version (new ver includes updated entries of your current ver – but backup your current menu.lst just in case!) everything went fine. In fact, 9.04 feels more fluid & responsive in some aspects, so all good so far.

The only problem I’ve noticed (and fixed) so far is that using my external Creative soundcard, and likely the Intel onboard card, sound stutters a bit. This is due to ALSA’s “glitch-free” (I kid you not) drivers, having, er, glitches when used through PulseAudio. I guess you could remove PulseAudio, if you really wanted to, but there’s a simple one line fix – just edit the file /etc/pulse/default.pa and add following line:

load-module module-hal-detect tsched=0

Then, either restart PulseAudio with /etc/init.d/pulseaudio restart or reboot – and job done – no more glitching sound.

A quick gnome-based sound test is to run the Sound application in System | Preferences (i.e. gnome-sound-properties) and just click the [Test] button on Sound Events | Sound Playback.

From some further reading, it seems tsched=0 is a kludgy workaround that can cause higher CPU usage for sound playback, and the real problem lies with the Ubuntu kernel being high latency.. (see Ubuntu Forum link below, post #43 onwards). I think I’d rather higher CPU usage than the sound breaking up on me, and playing some mp3s in VLC (just because the new Amarok’s still busy scraping together collection details from the NAS ) takes 2% of a single core on my laptop. When running at the lowest possible speed of 800Mhz.

I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem…

Sources: lglinux, ubuntu forums

Update:
Even with the above fix, sound would sometimes be a pain on an upgraded 9.04 – mute channels you had to unmute in alsamixer, xine and Gstreamer engine config woes, mplayer has sound but vlc doesn’t, or vice versa, or neither have sound but firefox does… I decided to just wipe the entire system (backing up the /home partition first for a file-system change over) and start again clean.

I think the glitches were from upgrading 8.04 to 8.10 to 9.04 and everything being a mish-mash of legacy code and deprecated configs held together with gaffer-tape and bubblegum… It wasn’t pretty. But with a fresh system slapped on EXT4 partitions, I get zero sound issues, the system boots and runs quicker than I’ve ever seen it go, and it only took a little while of checking some boxes in synaptic to get things back to pretty much where I left off. I’d definitely recommend installing 9.04 fresh – nothing else has that minty new-OS zing, or lack of seriously annoying glitches. Final Note: Be aware that if you go for EXT4 as your filesystem you will have to set some options and cross your fingers if you want to resize the partitions using the tools available in Jaunty, and that there can be a problem with delayed allocation and 0-byte files if the box falls over before committing data. If that doesn’t sound like it’s for you, XFS is fast and safe – and knocks EXT3 into a tinfoil-hat.

Update 2:
I somehow managed to get it so Nautilus and Firefox would play sound (through PulseAudio), but VLC or MoviePlayer or anything else wouldn’t… no idea how – perhaps by having the audacity to use my frackn machine? So obviously some programs are using pulseaudio, which seems to work, and others are trying to use ALSA, which isn’t working because pulseaudio is raping it… Anyway, I tried about 5 things to fix the sound – here’s some details:

1.) From the Simple Guide to Sound on Hardy, Intrepid & Jaunty, I ran:

sudo apt-get install asoundconf-gtk alsa-oss libasound2 libasound2-plugins padevchooser gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio ubuntu-restricted-extras

and rebooted. Did this help? No. And most of it was installed already.

2.) I upgraded ALSA to 1.0.19 (while 1.0.18 is the one in official jaunty repos at the mo) using the script here. Did this help? Not immediately. But it won’t have hurt.

3.) I installed vlc-plugin-pulse – and after changing the audio output to Pulseaudio server, VLC would produce stuttery sound, which is a start.

3.) I read a bunch of this stuff: Multiple Sound Solution, some more, and then even more.

4.) I went System | Preferences | Default Sound Card and chose MY SOUND CARD – *not* pulse audio (you can also do this from the command line with: asoundconf set-default-card CARDNAME – to find out which cards are available, run: asoundconf list). I then went to System | Preferences | Sound and changed all my settings away FROM Pulseaudio TO Alsa Mixer for my soundcard (the reason I say my soundcard is that I’ve got an onboard Intel soundcard, and an external USB Creative one I prefer to use because it has optical input/output) – if you hit the [Test] button with ALSA used for playback and it doesn’t play, that’s your glitch.

5.) ALSA decided it would play, I changed VLC back to ALSA output from Tools | Preferences | Audio – and *bang* – no more suck-ass, stuttery, crackly pulseaudio sound. Pure clean audio from all applications.

I wish I could be more specific about exactly what fixed it for me when I was having no sound – but I genuinely don’t know exactly what combination of steps fixed things. One minute ALSA mixer wouldn’t play, the next it would – it’s some kind of pulseaudio/alsa conflict, and using ALSA gives me the best sound, when Pulseaudio doesn’t hijack it… There are steps to remove pulseaudio, and at the present time, as much as I like the goal of it it’s not doing the job, so the next conflict I get I’m going to go the full hog and purge.

As a last resort if you have no sound make sure none of your mixers are muted by running alsamixer -c 0 for your first soundcard, alsamixer -c 1 for your second etc.. and make sure none of the playback mixers have MM (i.e. Muted) on them at the bottom, pressing ‘M’ on them will unmute and change it to the bizarely named ’00′ – to do this from a nicer GUI, just install gnome-alsamixer.

Last Chance Saloon Update:
If you’ve got sound in some things but not all, check your gstreamer-properties (by typing that very thing at the console) and make sure you’ve got your audiosinks right. gstreamer-properties is just a front-end for the gstreamer part of gconf-editor btw. I’ve discussed it a bit here.

Last LAST Chance Saloon Update on 16/02/2010: If you’re sure it’s pulseaudio which is messing your application up, launch it without going through pulseaudio via pasuspender NAME-OF-YOUR-APPLICATION. I came up against this when trying to fix ScummVM sound the other day under Karmic 9.10.

Good luck!