Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Ethernet woes

So an old problem has recently revisited me. The b44 kernel module which provides the driver for my broadcom ethernet chip has issues. Mainly it likes to reset under heavy traffic. You wouldn't normally notice except that when using vpnclient it disconnects the VPN connection which is very annoying. I did some searching around previously and found some commentary by the driver maintainer that this resetting behavior was on purpose and they had no plans to change it. So I went to ndiswrapper and after some futzing around I got this to work. So now it doesn't disrupt my vpn session, but apparently it causes the vpn kernel module to sometimes crash and hang parts of my system after I disconnect the vpn :( This is what I call typical linux behavior. I am constantly trading one bug for another. Sometimes it's my choice, sometimes not :)

Now, if I can just figure out how to stop the system from loading b44 at boot. blacklisting it didn't seem to stop it.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Here we go again

Last night was another exercise in frustration. I decided to try skype again so I called up the parents and waited for them to log on. I call them and get audio and video from their side, but they can't hear or see us. No LED on the webcam confirms it's not working. I try "rebooting" the camera by unplugging it and plugging it back in again. Another call and video is working! However, audio is still not working. I go into the sound manager (Gnome) and see that the webcam is not selected for input (can't the system mix different inputs?). I select it and see the VU meter working but still no sound in skype. Restarting skype and everything works. I don't understand why pulse or whatever isn't making the microphone available to skype dynamically.

Here's a nag from the archives - my video woes on my E1705 laptop. It has an ATI x1400. Short story - I've never had reliable 3d from this card. Long story: In the beginning I had to use the ATI catalyst drivers and like everything else in linux it was a trade off. I had to trade sleep/hibernate for opengl. But no matter what I did, I couldn't get Beryl or Compiz to work. Eventually, ATI stopped supporting the X1400 in their driver updates and it still had issues with suspend (there were probably some other issues as well). By that time the open source driver supposedly had 3d support. I found that some things seemed to work, but googleearth would crash after a minute or two. So I've never got full use out of that video card, except of course when I actually ran windows :(

Thursday, November 18, 2010

In the beginning

Well, I decided that it was time to start documenting my many frustrations with linux. This is going to be a venting space for me. I hope it helps relieve the anger that I sometimes feel. I should be clear in stating that I use no other operating system at home besides linux. I flirted for a few years with OSX, but found that I couldn't upgrade the OS with out upgrading the hardware. As far as linux goes, I have been using it at home since 1996 or so. Perhaps I know too much.

I was originally a Red Hat user, but I became really frustrated with the packaging system. You had to "discover" dependencies one layer at a time as you installed. I kept seeing this thing called APT being referenced on Slashdot and finally gave Debian a try. I really haven't looked back since, although I run mostly Ubuntu now.

Tonight's frustration is with Skype (again). Last week I rediscovered the magic environment variable I needed to set before running Skype to have video actually display. Turns out that running the GL version of Cairo-dock prevented video overlay from working (unless you set the magic environment variable). That's just great. I should note, this is a prime example of linux "just not working". I had originally run into that problem trying to get mythtv frontend to display video, but had forgotten all about it by the time I tried running Skype.

But I digress. I'll sum up past frustrations in a future post, but tonight's issue is with sound. It started fine, but then audio pretty much stopped. After killing skype and trying to edit sound settings, the sound settings tool gave me "waiting for sound system to respond", which it ultimately fails to do. Seems that pulse has gone out to lunch. Restarting pulse didn't fix the issue. Seems I am faced with Yet Another ReBoot (YARB). I might get away with restarting, but I haven't tried anything yet. I decided to start this blog first.

This is the latest in a long series of frustrations with Skype and linux on this computer (Dell zinoHD , ubuntu 10.04) and my laptop (Dell E1705). I swear, every time I use skype to talk with my parents, something goes wrong. My dad is really not impressed. His windows box never has a problem. Why is this so hard with linux?

Time to reboot. I'm sure I'll be back within the week.

update: unplugging the webcam (logitech c260, uvc driver) then plugging it back in had some success. Audio output started to work, but then the microphone on the webcam would not show up in the sound preferences. Is there some magic to make this happen? I guess so - I had to unplug and plug it back it twice more after which the microphone started working. Skype lasted about 10 minutes before sound input and output ceased to work again. *sigh*