Sound works!

I am only an average user of Linux, and hence I pick and use Ubuntu. There are few things I found troublesome in using Linux and they are:

• video - it is painful to use VESA driver as it makes every slow. It really hurts the first impression!
  
• sound - well, it works, but the sound control is a mess! For instance, there is a slider for main volume, but it doesn't work. You need to use the PCM slider to get things work.
• FLAC + CUE

I am happy to report that the last two has definitely be rectified in the latest version of Ubuntu 9.10. I now can use Audicious to listen to CUE+FLAC archive I have. It was a bit of a joke before, FLAC is a very popular format for audio, but the support for cue+flac is almost not existing. In fact, many has resorted to using foobar2k under WINE.

Also, sound control has finally got the polish it needed! There is a slider, and a slider works!

Just for these features alone, Ubuntu 9.10 is a worthy upgrade!

Migrate to Karmic Koala

Just finished all the upgrading from Jaunty to Karmic Koala, and all went without a problem. Though don't know if it is because the new version gets a better error reporting, I seem to get more "crashes" from application before. Other than that, things seems just work. I even took the risk of converting the file system from EXT3 to EXT4 and upgrade GRUB to GRUB2

Create split virtual HD for VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a great tool and I like it a lot.  However, the inability of creating split virtual  hard drive into 2GB chunks can be a problem at times.  Most flash pen drives use FAT32 to maximize its compatibility with different OSes, but at the same time this limits the maximum file size to 2GB.  The inability of spliting virtual drive into 2GB blocks makes transporting  native VDI image files used by  VirtualBox impossible.  However, there is a workaround as VirtualBox is also compatible with images created by VMWare which allows split images.

Today, I found this website which allow people to create empty VMware compatble images without using a VMWare product.

http://www.easyvmx.com/new-easyvmx.shtml

With the help of this link, you can now create virtual machines with split file feature under VirtualBox.

Fix VFS Invalid Compression Format

Today my laptop lookup while it was updating, and I had to hard reset it.  However, the system won't boot up properly, and instead, it gave me the Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block error.  I have tried a number of suggestions found in Google, but didn't have much luck.  Eventually, I managed to restore my system by the following.

1. Boot up the system using a LiveCD.  (I was using the Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop live CD)
2. Open a command prompt, and sudo -s to become a super user
3. Mount your boot partition, i.e. mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/
4. Use chroot to become the root user of the newly mounted partition, i.e. chroot /mnt/
5. Use aptitude search linux to find out the available images package on the repository
6. Reinstall the image, i.e. aptitude reinstall linux-image-2.6.28-15-generic
7. After it all done, get your fingers crossed, and reboot the system

With some luck, you may be able to get a working system back like myself.

To be on the safe side, I have rerun the aptitude reinstall linux-image-2.6.28-15-generic command again after I booted back to Gnome.

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Opera 10

It has been a while since I have been using Opera 10 on Ubuntu. It seems that a usable browser has finally arrived. Firefox is good, but it is awfully slow on Ubuntu (all versions I have tried), especially on those flash sites or Javascript heavy sites. Opera 9 is okay, but it hangs a lot on Javascript/ flash heavy sites. It is a rejoice to see something finally works well.

Opera setup

To get Opera, add the this

deb http://deb.opera.com/opera stable non-free

to the Software Source (under System->Administration). After add the key from http://deb.opera.com/. Now Opera should be on your repository and ready for you to install.


Also refer to instruction on Opera's site http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/841/

Off Topic: MCE 2005

Today when I tried to play files using MCE2005, I found video, music and few other options were missing fron the MCE. After hunting around, I found this instruction which successfully bring back all the options: http://www.eggheadcafe.com/forumarchives/windowsmediacenter/Sep2005/post23921289.asp