December 2013 - luv-main

ALSA USB and motherboard
by Russell Coker 30 Dec '13

30 Dec '13

I have a new Dell PowerEdge T110 workstation to replace the old T105. Both of them lack any proper sound hardware so I've got USB speakers. Some time in the process of replacing the system or the monitor (which is a USB hub and thus changes USB device assignment) sound stopped working in KDE. It seems that the main problem is that there is some sort of sound hardware detected on the motherboard (maybe the built in PC speaker) which causes the real sound hardware to be registered as ALSA device 1. So far the only way I've discovered to make things work is to make the following sym-links to make the USB sound hardware be device 0. # ls -l /dev/snd total 0 drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 60 Dec 9 20:49 by-id drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 80 Dec 9 20:49 by-path lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 9 Dec 18 00:05 controlC0 -> controlC1 crw-rw---T. 1 root audio 116, 3 Dec 9 20:49 controlC1 crw-rw---T. 1 root audio 116, 5 Dec 9 20:49 hwC0D0 lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 8 Dec 18 00:09 pcmC0D0p -> pcmC1D0p crw-rw---T. 1 root audio 116, 4 Dec 9 20:49 pcmC0D3p crw-rw---T. 1 root audio 116, 2 Dec 18 00:09 pcmC1D0p crw-rw---T. 1 root audio 116, 1 Dec 9 20:49 seq crw-rw---T. 1 root audio 116, 33 Dec 9 20:49 timer Is there a way that I can reserve device 0 for the USB device? It needs to be reserved because the motherboard hardware is detected before the USB bus is scanned - if the monitor is even turned on when the system is booted. Is there a way I can make the system just ignore the motherboard device and have only 1 ALSA card? There's only one thing that can ever be useful so it seems best to make it the only recognised card in the system. Thanks -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Upgrading to Fedora 20 using fedup - what is the ISO format wanted?
by Allan Duncan 27 Dec '13

27 Dec '13

I have an iso image of the Fedora 20 install DVD, but when I try to use it I get this: > fedup -v --iso Fedora-20-x86_64-DVD.iso --network 20 usage: fedup <SOURCE> [options] fedup: error: argument --iso: invalid isofile value: 'Fedora-20-x86_64-DVD.iso' > I wrote this exact iso file to a stick. mounted it, and used the "--device DEV" option, and successfully ran the upgrade, so I would like to know for the future what does the "--iso" option really want?

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Linux Friendly Equipment Vendors.
by Robert Shelton 27 Dec '13

27 Dec '13

Hello, I'm curious if anyone could recommend Linux friendly hardware suppliers in Melbourne? We're a small/medium business, and I often get the feeling that server, network and storage vendors want to push non-FOSS platforms and are unable to advise on integration with existing FOSS systems. Would make a nice change to have a vendor who understood the merits of Linux KVM, DRBD, Amanda backup, etc. Cheers, Rob.

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Recommendations for good Linux Haswell laptops?
by Chris Samuel 27 Dec '13

27 Dec '13

Hi folks, Anyone got any recommendations or experiences with Haswell laptops running Linux yet? Thinking that it might be time to refresh my work laptop and a Haswell Ultrabook could be quite enticing.. cheers! Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC

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15" laptop recommendation
by Bianca Gibson 25 Dec '13

25 Dec '13

Hi everyone, My brother is looking for a new laptop. He uses it for generally pretty basic stuff - multimedia playback, web browsing, a bit of gimp. His criteria is: - Ideally 15" screen, 14" would be acceptable - 2.5kg or lower - ideally battery lasting through a day at uni - running ubuntu Please reply all to include him in the discussion. Cheers, Bianca

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kdeconnect - sync your phone and KDE desktop
by Andrew Greig 21 Dec '13

21 Dec '13

Hi all, I thought I would take kdeconnect-kde for a spin, I used the OpenSUSE13.1 version and installed the Android App on my Samsung Galaxy s2. My phone is connected to the WiFi network but the desktop can't see it and vice versa. Has anyone else used this, yet, and do I need to register my phone name in my desktop hosts file for this to work? In theory, when I walk in the door at home my computer should automatically link with my phone. At the moment they are not on speaking terms. Cheers Andrew Greig

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Re: ALSA USB and motherboard
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 17 Dec '13

17 Dec '13

zlinw(a)mcmedia.com.au writes: Oops for got the Subject line Russell Coker said, > Is there a way that I can reserve device 0 for the USB device? It needs > to > be reserved because the motherboard hardware is detected before the USB > bus > is scanned - if the monitor is even turned on when the system is booted. In theory one can cause ALSA to allocate snd devices to a particular alsa sound device number, I have though NEVER though in a good number of years been able to get this to work with any kind of relaibilty. > Is there a way I can make the system just ignore the motherboard device > and have only 1 ALSA card? There's only one thing that can ever be > useful > so it seems best to make it the only recognised card in the system. There are two ways one can compile a kernel with only the sound device driver required present. The second method is simpler than anything else and does work. Do an lsmod and identify the main module that is loaded for the offending device then blacklist this module in .... /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base-blacklist.conf (in debian anyway) This prevents the kernel loading the module. Lindsay

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None
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 17 Dec '13

17 Dec '13

Russell Coker said, >Is there a way that I can reserve device 0 for the USB device? It needs to >be reserved because the motherboard hardware is detected before the USB bus >is scanned - if the monitor is even turned on when the system is booted. In theory one can cause ALSA to allocate snd devices to a particular alsa sound device number, I have though NEVER though in a good number of years been able to get this to work with any kind of relaibilty. >Is there a way I can make the system just ignore the motherboard device >and have only 1 ALSA card? There's only one thing that can ever be useful >so it seems best to make it the only recognised card in the system. There are two ways one can compile a kernel with only the sound device driver required present. The second method is simpler than anything else and does work. Do an lsmod and identify the main module that is loaded for the offending device then blacklist this module in .... /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base-blacklist.conf (in debian anyway) This prevents the kernel loading the module. Lindsay

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git add slow; git status quick
by Tim Connors 16 Dec '13

16 Dec '13

git beginner here, so forgive me. As part of change management of a couple hundred servers, we do a regular 'git add .' on a central repository of half a million files, followed by a bit of munging, then a 'git commit -a -m ...' (rhel5, so 'git -a' is 'git -A' elsewhere). 'git add .' is very very slow at finding the additions and modifications (we don't care about the '-u' deletions at this stage, because of the future munging required) and staging them. I suspect it's actually staging every single file rather than just changes. 'git status -s' on a freshly changed repository prior to doing any git add is really quite quick (no, it's not a cold or undersized cache issue), and finds all additions, deletions and modifications. We could simply pipe that rather small output to 'git add' and it would be much much quicker at staging them (er, I think; but also, a bit of a kludge). Any known reason why git-add would appear to be recursing through the entire tree staging even unchanged files, and not just acting on the changed files that git-status obviously can find very quickly? Any missing bit of git magic I could be applying? -- Tim Connors

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Graphics driver work update
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 15 Dec '13

15 Dec '13

Some time back I was mentioning a problem I was having with the NVidia closed src driver. Russel Coker made a sugestion I checked out the open src driver. Now I have had a look at the state of progress on both NVidia and ATI/AMD cards and the big open src improver is for Radeon R600g driver. This covers ATI/AMD Radeon HD3000 to 6870 cards, (NOT the 6900 cards these being covered by the Radeonsi driver). For the R600g driver benchmarks using 3.11.1 kernel and Mesa 9.2 (both being in current debian testing) show that 3D apps were running at around 2/3rds of the frame rate as the windows driver. There were plenty of reports from users saying it was running all linux games with the quality sliders at max at 60 fps, there being only a single report slower than that and it said it was smooth and highly playable. All stated the driver was very stable and one could switch to a kernel console and back to X without crashing the system. With kernel 3.12.0 and mesa 10, this of course is fairly new, benchmarks comparing with windows 7 produced the same results, ie the driver was as fast as the one on windows. This is all excellent news for opensource Linux. Interestingly around 2 years ago when the AMD open source liason officer was asked if the opensource driver would EVERY get as fast as the then windows driver he replied it would and would likely end up faster. His reasons for saying that was he said that the opensource was a far cleaner and simpler driver than the windows counterpart, not having to worry about backwards compatibilty and a binary interface to the kernel. Lindsay

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