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*

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