Well, I got Fedora 7 installed on my laptop today. That’s actually what I’m using right now. I must say, it’s pretty slick overall. I’ve been very impressed with some of the new features that are available by default. If you are currently running an older version of Fedora [Core], give 7 a try.
‘Tis the night before TJOC and all through the apartment, not a soul was sleeping, not even me …
It’s been a long rampup to camp for me already, and camp doesn’t officially start until tomorrow (well, later today). We did the Diagnostic O written test online this year, and since I’m the one that suggested it and have the skills, I was responsible for implementing it. Not that I’m complaining … it really is a cool project, it’s just my timeline really sucked. I waited too long to really get started, and that left me almost too little time to get all the core features completed before we needed to roll it out to everyone.
But, all of that to say, I’m not the only one up late. There are still last minute test takers going right now. An email was sent out earlier today giving an official cutoff of 8AM CST on Saturday and there have been quite a few new users and test attempts since. If only more of the students had completed it … we just had barely broken 50% this morning.
I guess there are still a couple of hours ……….
Well, I found a way to make it work, but I’m not sure why it broke to begin with. In /etc/asound.conf I simply changed the variable “defaults.pcm.device” from a value of 4, to one of 0. I chose zero only because the output of aplay -l indicated that device zero was my main device … I can’t get any audio out of 4 for whatever reason. Anyway, it’s working for now and I thought it smart to write this down for any others looking … and for me if I need it later.
So, I’ve finally run into my first real issue with Fedora Core 6. Don’t get me wrong, it has done me well for quite some time now, but it finally cried ‘Gotcha!’ the other day. In the course of a standard ‘yum update’, which, since it’s so simple, I tend to do pretty often, my ALSA packages got upgraded to 1.0.14-0.1.rc1.fc6. Not really paying attention too closely, a side effect of it normally being pretty painless, I went about my business for several more hours. This being a laptop, it got shutdown before heading to bed … and then started back up as I realized I’d like to watch some cartoons (Looney Tunes DVDs are great) while laying in bed trying to unwind.
Here’s where the story gets ugly … I didn’t have any sound when the machine came back up. No sound! How am I supposed to watch a DVD without sound? It seems that the few applications I have that still have OSS support will function if I manually set them to OSS and not ALSA, but those apps are in the minority by far these days.
So, it’s been a couple of days and there haven’t been any ‘whoops’ updates to ALSA, nor does there appear to be a flurry of activity on the Web. That leaves me in a bit of a quandry. I don’t know enough about yum, even after digesting the man pages, to try and roll back to an old version to see if that fixes it, nor do I really know enough about ALSA (once upon a time I did, but a lot has changed since then).
What really confuses me is that Fedora has a few utilities for managing sound and sound cards. Some of the ‘can you hear this sound’ checks pass just fine (when selecting a card for instance), but the user level properties that let me select ‘Auto Detect’, or a specific device all fail (unless I select OSS, but even then my apps can’t play sound).
Anyone out there know enough to help? I’m on an IBM Thinkpad R50e that uses the snd_intel8×0 module normally (and it’s currently loaded). Help?!?
I’ve been half-heartedly looking for some way to read my external 40GB HD from inside Windows. The hitch is that it is formatted EXT3. Maybe now that I have a Windows machine that can format FAT32 I should, but in the interim I found a utility that lets me mount my EXT3 drive as a normal drive in Windows! You have to check out ext2fsd if you need a solution like I mentioned.
Looks like Gnome 2.10 finally made its way (unmasked) into Portage today. I’m in the process of compiling it and a few other things here at work. I’m kicking the process off at the apartment as well, so hopefully it will be well on the way to completion by the time I get home tonight.
A nice tutorial for writing Wordpress 1.5 plugins.
Woooo hoooo! It looks like Gnome 2.8 has finally made it’s way into the unstable tree of Gentoo. I’ve been waiting weeks for this, as I didn’t wish to unmask it and risk problems. I’ve been following the forums at gentoo.org for a while, and some of the people there have been going nuts since they were ‘forced’ to wait so long after the official release from the Gnome team. I’m just thankful that there are people out there willing to take the time to put it all together for me.
I guess I should put a comment here about books.quad4.org. We have updated the book data for Fall 2004, so all the major features should be up and running with good data. I would eventually like to spend some time auditing Scum’s PHP code that runs the site. There have been a few items that he has mentioned over the last few years that I think I might be able to enhance or just plain get working. He definately has the design capabilities that I totally lack, so for now now visible changes should ever appear.
I just set up Mantis on Gollum to help me track my photo gallery program. It doesn’t have to be entirely for this one project, but that was the most relevant one at the time. You can find the bug tracker at bugs.quad4.org.