« Posts tagged Gnome

ALSA and pogo.com java games sound problems

Monday, September 22, 2008 / posted in Hardware, Linux / 2 Comments

Couple weeks ago I upgraded my mothers computer from Microsoft XP to Linux Debian Lenny (testing). Everything is working except sound with pogo.com java games. After couple weeks searching for a fix and reading ALSA documention and tinkering around.

the problematic soundcard is

$ lspci
...
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 70)
...

This is what I ended up with to get the sound to work with the pogo.com java games. First I created the ~/.asoundrc file, and this what I added to the ~/.asoundrc file.

!defaults.pcm.card 0
defaults.ctl.card 0
defaults.pcm.device 0
defaults.pcm.subdevice -1
defaults.pcm.dmix.device defaults.pcm.device
defaults.pcm.dsnoop.device defaults.pcm.device

After saving the file we have to restart ALSA

# /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart
Shutting down ALSA…done.
Setting up ALSA…done.

Note: this fix may not work for everyone.

Gnome System Monitor causes Xorg to consume 100% CPU

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 / posted in Linux / 1 Comment

With Gnome System Monitor 2.22 under Debian testing (Lenny) I had the problem when I clicked on the Resources tab the CPU usage would got to 100% on my laptop and desktop.

Well I have been able to fix the problem on my laptop which has and Intel video card by adding Option “AccelMethod” “EXA” to the Device section in my xorg.conf file.

Example:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller"
        Driver          "intel"
        BusID           "PCI:0:2:0"
        Option           "AccelMethod"  "EXA"
EndSection

When I have worked out how to fix the problem on my desktop using a Nvidia video card I will post the solution.

Thanks goes out to MistaED for pointing out to me that this a problem with the way Cairo rendering is done.

TeamSpeak and Urban Terror under Linux

Monday, February 11, 2008 / posted in Linux / 4 Comments

For the people that want to run TeamSpeak and Urban Terror together on the one machine here is quick howto to stop TeamSpeak hogging the audio.

1) You need to install alsa-oss

sudo apt-get install alsa-oss

2) goto Applications => Internet, right click on TeamSpeak and add launcher to Panel or Pesktop
3) Right click on the TeamSpeak launcher on Panel or Desktop and goto Properties => Launcher
4) In the command section add ‘aoss‘ in front of ‘teamspeak‘, eg – ‘aoss teamspeak‘
5) close the Properties window and launch TeamSpeak from your modified launcher

enjoy 🙂

Notes:
Thanks to MatthewV with his help with testing 🙂

This HowTo should work with other games but I have only tested it with Urban Terror

Reference:
Ubuntu alsa-oss

Making Me TV for Ubuntu based system

Sunday, November 18, 2007 / posted in Linux / No Comments

Compiling
Firstly, there’s a bunch of development libraries and tools that need to be installed,

sudo apt-get install build-essential autotools-dev automake libxml-parser-perl pkg-config libgnome2-dev libgnomeui-dev libxtst-dev libxine-dev libxml2-dev libglade2-dev cdbs libglibmm-2.4-dev libgtkhtml3.8-dev debhelper fakeroot intltool libtool

Next, you’ll want to get the latest version of the source from the Launchpad download page. Extract the source,

tar zxvf me-tv*.tar.gz

Now, compile Me TV,

cd me-tv-*
./autogen.sh
make

The binary should be created at src/me-tv. This binary alone isn’t much use without an existing installation of Me TV because it requires some files to be installed on the system.

Building a deb package
If compiling works then you should be able to build the deb package,

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

This will have created the deb package for under the me-tv-* directory

Installing the deb package
To install the deb package you created

sudo dpkg -i me-tv_*.deb

References
Official Me TV Home Page
Me TV 0.4.0 and Ubuntu 7.10

Me TV 0.4.0 and Ubuntu 7.10

Saturday, October 27, 2007 / posted in Linux / 6 Comments

Introduction
Me TV is a digital television (DVB) viewer for GNOME.

Me TV was developed for the modern digital lounge room with a PC for a media centre that is capable of normal PC tasks (web surfing, word processing and watching TV). It is not designed to be a full-blown media centre, such as MythTV, but will integrate well with the existing GNOME desktop.

Features currently include:

* Completely mouse driven
* Current and future program information
* Instant Record
* Double-click fullscreen
* DVB-T and DVB-C support
* Very simple installation and set up

Setup
First off you need to download and install Me TV 0.4.0 for Ubuntu 7.10:

wget https://launchpad.net/me-tv/stable/0.4/+download/me-tv_0.4.0_i386.deb

then cd to the directory were you saved the deb and type:

sudo dpkg -i me-tv_0.4.0_i386.deb

Now create ~/.me-tv/ if it does not already exist:

mkdir ~/.me-tv/

Now to install dvd-utils to get the TV channels:

sudo apt-get install dvb-utils

Once dvb utils is installed we need to scan for TV channels and this is how we do that:

scan /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/dvb-t/au-Adelaide > ~/.me-tv/channels.conf

Note: You will have to ls the /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/dvb-t/ directory for your location an substitute au-Adelaide for your location.

Final step now is to launch Me TV:

Applications –> Sound and Video –> Me TV

Screenshots of version 0.4.0

Me TV 0.4.0 Me TV 0.4.0 File Menu Me TV 0.4.0 View Menu Me TV 0.4.0 Help Menu Me TV 0.4.0 EPG

References
Official Me TV Home Page
Me TV Project Website
Linux TV Wiki
UHF Log-Periodic Array

F-Spot fails to load

Monday, September 24, 2007 / posted in Linux / No Comments

With a fresh install of Ubuntu 7.04, F-Spot was failing to load from the menu and sat there using CPU cycles heavily and having to issue the following command in terminal

$ killall f-spot

After that i thought I would try run F-Spot from terminal to see what errors there was

$ f-spot

and this was the reoccurring error

Starting new FSpot server
Cant’ get a connection to the dbus. Trying again…

Well I found it was very simple to fix the problem and all that has to be done is this

$ rm -rf ~/.gnome2/f-spot

After that F-Spot started up correctly.