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Rather than fight Pulse Audio for sound mixing, I finally bought a used SB! Live sound card for hardware mixing. It works. Wow. Apparently, Linux can be fussy about hardware, but once you get the right stuff, it finally works. Quite amusing for a sound card that is considered old by Windoze standards.

Intrepid Ibex is set for release next month and speaking of Pulse Audio, I hope it’s fixed with this version. Very much thinking of moving to the Linux Mint distro however for Debian with even less fuss than Ubuntu.

Might play around with OpenSUSE again now that I have a solid sound card.

...which was a shock, because I could never get an Ubuntu LiveCD working at all.

I decided to look at the KDE interface with openSUSE instead of GNOME, which I use with Ubuntu. Interesting. I could not get sound to work whatsoever, however. That’s not a good thing. Granted, I will need to install it to play a little more with it, but… so far, not a good sign.

Can’t seem to get the .iso burned, however. If possible, I’d really like to use a LiveCD first before totally wiping everything again. Or to get another hard drive.

Because Ubuntu is a Debian build, if at first things don’t succeed, I reference it as far as Debian.

I’m not sure why, but sound output protocols just seem to be so schizoid in Debian builds (which include Ubuntu).

First, there’s JACK.
Then there’s OSS (Open Sound System).
Next is ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture).
Finally, the latest project is PulseAudio.

ALSA is pretty stable, but as it’s particular to Linux alone, some are more enthused about OSS. PulseAudio is supposed to be the latest and greatest as it addresses software mixing (more than one application/program has access to sound, by software means) better, but it has brought Ubuntu 8.04 to its knees.

I am not the only one who cannot get a microphone to work, much less the other goodies. PulseAudio is almost like a fickle yet jealous lover—it might work for you, it might not—but if you fiddle with it to get it to work, it can have adverse effects on your system (a good drubbing, perhaps?)

Setting up file shares between my wife’s lappy and the family desktop was a snap with samba.

The only problem I am running into when I try to create shares on my end is that samba insists I am not root user (nor asks for a password).

Wanted to move my file-server over to linux. Almost finished. 3 days moving data around and repartitioning.
Messed up 2 installs of ubuntu so far but should be ok once i get the samba shares setup.

my brother gave it to me a couple weeks ago. its my second laptop with linux on it. I get the just of it but i know that there is a whole other level of it that i dont understand. This will be another thing to learn from my brother.

Well, I think I found out my new Audigy SE card doesn’t support hardware mixing (to output sound to multiple apps), but under ALSA, I was having a lot of problems with bass-heavy music.

Switched over to OSS… holy cow… what a difference.

Ubuntu Unleashed at Blogger seems to be a much more useful resource for me right now than the Ubuntu forums.

It’s mainly a collection of solutions, tweaks, links to programs, etc. and reads very well as a news feed. Picking things at will and trying to implement them seems much more satisfying than making a post and waiting for the mercy of the community to answer it, or digging through posts and finding about a dozen different answers, not all of them necessarily applicable.