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Help! I’ve Installed Kubuntu on my Notebook and the Sound Doesn’t Work!
I just (well, a few weeks ago) installed an instance of Kubuntu on a Dell Studio 17 (the host OS is Vista Home Premium 64-bit) and the volume went from low, after the initial installation, to non-existent after rebooting. Was it possible that the volume on Amarok was down? Nope, it was at 100%. Was the volume setting located in the task bar set to mute? No again. Was the Mixer at fault? No.
After trolling the web and finding many possible reasons for the sudden onset of muteness (bad drivers, conflicting installations of software) I found a simple check that proved to be the most telling: I ran the command line alsamixer and made sure the volume is up!
This is what I saw after I opened a Konsole terminal window and typed alsamixer:
Notice the lack of color on the third bar; the one labelled PCM. After moving the cursor to the PCM column and pressing the up arrow a few dozen times the bar was nicely multi-colored. This is what the alsamixer levels looked like (notice the PCM is up) after my tinkering:
I pressed Esc to exit alsamixer and ran the following to save the settings:
sudo alsactl store
The cat was alive.
My Eclipse Plug-in Stopped Working After I Copied It Onto My Linux Box!
I ran into an interesting problem the other day: I was copying my Eclipse workspace from my Windows Vista box to a Linux environment and the plug-in stopped working (when I say not working I mean that I double-clicked on plugin.xml and the Plug-in Development Environment treated it like an empty plug-in: no name., no id, no dependencies…nothing). I have been working on and off on a plug-in, keeping copious notes as I want to blog about the various things I have been doing for future blogs, when I found that the plugin.xml file appeared to be disconnected from the plug-in project itself.
Rather than write my usual wordy post here is the solution: when the plug-in was created/copied on Windows the META-INF/MANIFEST.MF files somehow ended up in lower case. When I copied the workspace to the Linux box the Eclipse plug-in development environment did not know what to make of the new lower case names and so did what any self-respecting IDE would do: Eclipse ignored it.
Rename the folder and file to upper case: META-INF/MANIFEST.MF. The project will come back to life. Life goes on.
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