Grrrr. My sons laptop has Ubuntu Lucid installed. After some happening or other which I cannot determine we lost the volume indicator. A common enough problem. I've on & off spent a goodly few hours of my life trying to solve this and thought I was going to come unstuck. This is one of those frustrating Linux episodes that make you wonder what the hell you were doing when you threw that XP disk away.....
We tried to look at the sound settings & got Connected failed / Waiting for sound system to respond problem & all that jazz. Hunted high & low but found no sensible answers.
I then noticed that pulse wasn't running (hence the errors). When I tried to run it I got :
$ pulseaudio
E: module.c: Failed to open module "module-udev-detect": file not found
E: main.c: Module load failed.
E: main.c: Failed to initialize daemon.
locate module-udev-detect
So what was going wrong ? More hours of fruitless searching.
A trip to /etc/pulse showed that around 29th Nov, default.pa was modified. By what or how, I have no idea (guess I'll have a look in the logs).
Anyway, inspection of the line around module-udev-detect shows this :
### Automatically load driver modules depending on the hardware available
.ifexists module-udev-detect.so
load-module module-udev-detect. tsched=0
.else
See that little full stop after 'detect' ? Shouldn't be there. Take it out, like a bad tooth.
### Automatically load driver modules depending on the hardware available
.ifexists module-udev-detect.so
load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0
.else
The above works perfectly. How f-ing ridiculous.
Now I'm proud of my boy. I slowly got him on to linux, and when we got him a secondhand machine to take back with him when he joined the Arny, I asked if he wanted Windows or Linux. 'Linux' was the firm reply. 'Why would I want Windows ?'
Well I can tell you why. Because Windows has many faults and I won't use it unless absolutely necessary, but it doesn't suffer from some of the ridiculous f-ups that Linux does if you just use the basics and don't mess about with it (or let your kids surf crap sites).
Shit like this just should not happen. It's amateurish. Gives Linux a bad name. Come on peeps. this is meant to a be a LTS. It has nothing out of the ordinary installed and it should just work. And one full stop can create such havoc ??
A follow up. He also couldn't watch DVDs. Finally managed to get it working with a lot of messing about (which again should be unnecessary) and he is now happy as and watches stuff on it with his mates most nights. At this rate we'll have half the Army signed up to Linux ! They were all amazed when he first got it out & it just worked (DVDs aside !)
ReplyDeleteMy only grip about Linux. Some things are just too difficult and should be much easier. If you want to get people of Windows, some basic things should just WORK. And updates shouldn't break something as fundamental as the sound.
It's also a night mare trying to find solutions. There should be one repository for knowledge - not a million sites all over the show. Fine, each site has it's own stuff, but that should link back so things can be cross checked, duplication massively reduced, thought processes concentrated and less time wasted.
What we need is a centralised but distributed help / fix system.
You can credit me with the idea........