Today I installed Fedora 10 on my desktop. I need to spend some months working with Fedora to prepare for my Red Hat Certified Engineer exam which I will hopefully take this summer.
I immediately had sound problems. Luckily, I was able to refer to my old posting from one year ago for the fix. This is just an edited version of that post.
My desktop is currently using the Creative Audigy SE sound card (ca0106) which can be very un-Linux friendly. As I mentioned 9 months ago, I was able to get sound from my front 3 speakers but I wanted all 5 speakers to work as well (5.1).
With Arch Linux and Gentoo Linux, I was able to get surround sound on all five speakers with the following .asoundrc file and saved it to my /home directory:
pcm.!dmix {
type plug
slave {
pcm surround51
channels 6
}
}
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm “dmix”
slave.channels 6
route_policy duplicate
}
With Fedora, similarly to Ubuntu, I was not getting surround sound with the above file.
I remembered that I needed to add the following to /etc/pulse/default.pa:
load-module module-alsa-sink device=”surround51″ channels=6 sink_name=sur51
Still, no surround sound. Then I reread my old post and realized that I needed to add the entire contents of .asoundrc to /etc/asound.conf as well to make the settings system wide.
I rebooted and got all 5 speakers to work. Thank God for old posts 
Well, it has been over a year since I made the move to the Gnome Desktop. I was not happy happy with KDE 4 and ended up dumping it. I thought the KDE Developers were crazy for making too many innovations. It was too buggy and took a lot of resources to run it.
Now KDE 4.2 is available and I am hearing a lot of good praises. Tony(saigonlinux) runs it on openSUSE and gave me a demonstration last Thursday. I was very impressed. As a former KDE user 5 years, I decided that I will give it a try this week.
Currently I am running the Gnome Desktop on my Arch Linux desktop. The Arch Linux developers are well known for their stable packages and sure enough KDE 4.2 was available. Tomorrow I plan to make the switch for a couple days to see how I like KDE 4.2.
Don’t get me wrong, the Gnome desktop is nice but I find myself prefering KDE applications over Gnome (k3b, kaffeine, amarok, etc.). Pidgin is nice but I really prefer Kopete. The list goes on and on. It is just a preference thing.
I will let you guys know what happens.
(KDE 4.2 Desktop – Source: KDE)
Last week I upgraded my motherboard and cpu, a yearly ritual for me now. Arch Linux is now the main system that I run on this desktop. Gentoo/Funtoo will be there for testing (Funtoo is really fun to play with). I will also test Pardus, a Turkish linux distribution. It may be a good distro to use in the educational setting.
Below are some pictures of me adding the new hardware:
(My tower with the old motherboard removed)
(The P43-series Gigabyte motherboard)
(I just installed the new motherboard in the tower)
(After I installed the new core 2 quad cpu and 4 Gigs of RAM)
(The finished system)
So I use Linux for most aspects of my tech life. I only run Windows at school or work but nearly 99% of the time I am running Linux.
Yes, I can listen to music, watch DVDs, and edit Word documents in Linux. Most of my colleagues and students do not even now that the documents I send them were edited with an open source word processor.
The only thing I cannot do is play my favorite games in Linux. That will change in a couple years though as Linux starts to take a chunk out of the market
Here are my current Linux systems:
- Desktop – Arch Linux
- IBM Thinkpad T60 Laptop – Sidux Linux
- Acer Aspire ONE Netbook – Ubuntu EEE
- Dell Inspiron 8100 Notebook – CentOS
- T-Mobile G1 – Android
- Motorola Rokr e6 – MontaVista
- Nokia N800 Internet Tablet – Maemo
My Dell Inspiron 8100 and Motorola Rokr are currently working at the moment. I need to replace the power supply unit on my Dell. This will be the third replacement. I dropped my Motorola phone a couple weeks ago. It bounced a couple times.
Both units will be running by the end of the month.
So how about you? What do you run Linux, or BSD (that means you Mac guys), on?
ubuwalker31 maybe surprised but I support his “Two New Software Freedoms” idea. After I posted Use nv, not nvidia drivers -> Save the headache, he accused me not allowing him “…to have the freedom to install proprietary software on my Linux system” at two separate sites:
Edit: Pierre removed the comment after I commented on his site and apologized. I greatly respect Pierre for taking a stance on this issue though. It is much needed in the open source community now.
That is far from the truth. I was merely ranting my frustration I was having with the nvidia drivers on my Gigabyte GeForce 7300GT graphics card on my desktop. Sometimes they work, sometimes they do not. AND yes, the nvidia drivers are working fine now at my preferred resolution but I WILL revert back to nv for stability reasons. That is my preference, it is my FREEDOM.
ubuwalker31 states that we should have:
- The Freedom to run any hardware, for any purpose
- The Freedom to run proprietary software, to run any hardware
I agree with him 100 percent. I want the FREEDOM to use propriety media codecs and drivers on my BSD/Linux system if I want to. Granted, the usage of propriety drivers and codecs should abide by the intellectual property and media laws of the country a person resides in, ie libdvdcss in the US. I just agree to the licenses and install them so I can watch and listen to Windows media files or watch dvds.
On my Thinkpad T60, I use the ATI propriety drivers which do, on occassion, break during updates. I can revert back to an older driver or just use vesa. It depends what I am doing at the time. If I am at a coffeeshop working on a presentation, I rather use vesa until I can get the time to figure out what the actual problem is (Debian Lenny is a godsend in this respect, it configured xorg.conf for me and I had not had any problems since using Lenny).
So to reiterate, I support ubuwalker31’s two new software freedoms and so should you!
Comments are welcome
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