When I upgraded to Kubuntu Lucid Lynx, they promised:
Firefox now integrates better with KDE, providing native KDE file dialogs as well as respecting your default choices for opening files, as set in KDE.
I was excited, no more having to keep a separate favorite places for Firefox and Dolphin. In reality after I upgraded I saw no such “integration.”
So several months later it bugged me enough to take another look at the problem. Reading the same copy as before I noticed a new sentence that either I missed or wasn’t there before:
Our Kubuntu Firefox Installer makes sure the necessary packages are installed, if you have installed Firefox manually you will need to install kmozillahelper for the integration.
Hmm… since I upgraded and didn’t install from scratch it seems that I needed to install the kmozillahelper package. Once I did and restarted Firefox, it worked. One step closer to an integrated desktop. Now I I could find a way to do this in chrome, openoffice.org, gimp…
Posted by benjamen as Firefox, Kubuntu, Lucid Lynx, linux at 12:56 PM UTC
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The main reason I upgraded my Myth boxes was so that I could use Boxee. I first tested it out on my main computer running Kubuntu 10.04 and everything worked pretty well. I expected the to Myth boxes running Xubuntu 10.04 would work just as well. Of course nothing is that easy, I log into Boxee and try to play something from my queue, no sound. I try something else, no sound. The third time was not the charm, so I tried the other Myth box and found the same problem.
I jumped onto Google and had to do a bit of searching before I found this post in the Boxee forums. The culprit seems to be … wait for it … pulseaudio. That would definitely explain why it worked on Kubuntu. Anyway the crux of the fix is as follows:
sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install esound
sudo killall pulseaudio
sudo restart gdm
In the original post he killed pulseaudio before he removed it, but I found that it would just pop up again in a few seconds. Also he said to restart the computer but I found that just restarting X was enough.
Posted by benjamen as Boxee, Kubuntu, Pulseaudio, Xubuntu, linux at 7:19 PM UTC
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For a while my computer has had the annoying habit of rebooting whenever I tell it to shutdown. That doesn’t sound so bad does it? What it means is that I need to be present at the machine if I want to turn it off. I can’t tell it to turn off after midnight or after a hour of being idle (and forget suspend, that’s never worked right).
On and off for the past few weeks I’ve been crawling through the system logs and BIOS trying to find an ACPI error or other warning that would explain why the kernel feels like it needs to reboot. Then on a whim I turned off Wake On LAN.
I had turned on WOL because I thought it would be cool if I could turn on my computer from another computer, netbook, or mobile device before I go downstairs to use it. It turns out that WOL on this particular motherboard doesn’t work the same as other computers. Usually you need to send a magic packet to wake a computer up, but for some reason my computer wakes up with a simple ping or any other traffic sent to it’s address.
Turning off WOL did the trick, the computer actually shuts down when I tell it to shutdown. So, either there is some traffic from the network directed at my machine or the same flaw that makes the motherboard wakeup without a magic packet keeps it from powering down.
Posted by benjamen as Karmic Koala, Kubuntu, computer, linux, network at 9:30 AM UTC
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I installed DOSBox on a Kubuntu Karmic machine to play The Incredible Machine, but I couldn’t get the sound working. I read a ton of forum posts about trying to get DOSBox working with Pulseaudio to no avail. Then I discovered that my Pulseaudio wasn’t working anyway.
I needed a way to tell the SDL (Simple Direct Media Layer) that DosBox should just use my soundcard like KDE was doing. One of the steps that kept coming up in the PulseAudio “fixes” was to type the line:
export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=pulse
or
export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=esd
before running DOSBox. I wondered if there was another setting for soundblaster or intel. So I googled SDL_AUDIODRIVER and found that there was a dsp option. So I typed:
export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=dsp
before starting DOSBox and viola I have sound.
*I’m not entirely sure it was necessary but in the process of trying to get Pulseaudio working I installed libsdl1.2debian-all.
Posted by benjamen as DOSBox, Karmic Koala, Kubuntu, Pulseaudio, linux at 12:56 PM UTC
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First let me just let me say that Amarok 2 blows! Why they screwed up such a great program is beyond me. You can always install Amarok 1.4, but why go backwards when players like Songbird are moving forward.
Unfortunately Songbird doesn’t seem to work out of the box with Kubuntu, the correct GStreamer packages don’t seem to be installed — even when you use a debian package! Maybe it’s just me but I’ve tried it on a Jaunty machine and a Karmic machine and I couldn’t get music to play back on either. It would just give me some cryptic error about alsasink and auotaudiosink. So here’s my short tutorial on how I got Songbird working.
- First I removed all GStreamer packages. This step may or may not have been necessary, but I mucked about for long time before I decided to start from scratch. It has the side effect of removing openoffice.org too, but you can just reinstall it when you’ve got songbird running.
- Reinstall GStreamer with this command:
sudo apt-get install libgstreamer0.10-0 gstreamer0.10-x gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gstreamer0.10-plugins-base gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
- Install the correct songbird package from Skyzim
sudo dpkg -i <package name>
- If you are using NVidia drivers remove the libvisual plugins.
sudo apt-get remove libvisual-0.4-plugins
That did it for me.
References:
Installing Songbird [Ubuntu Documentation]
GStreamer Setup [SongBird Wiki]
NVidia Driver Issue [edsalisbury.net]
Songbird Installer [Skyzim]
Posted by benjamen as Jaunty Jackalope, Karmic Koala, Kubuntu, Songbird at 9:05 AM UTC
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