Project 4Fifteen

Well Ubuntu and Skype is a real pain.. No idea why they made it this difficult, but I decided to disable Pulse Audio and now finally, everything seems to work for my purposes. This includes Skype with microphone, Music, movies etc. No complex configurations to fiddle with every time the system restarts.

This guide will help you to kind of disable pulseaudio from starting / avoid pulseaudio to hog the sound hardware. It also solves the problem of every boot, the master channel is turned all the way down and muted.

Wow.. what an epic journey. I have a Dell D620 laptop and running Intrepid (Ubuntu 8.10) on it.

The problem is that the modem is not detected normally and the downloads from various places do not cater for the type of modem installed.
My modem had the following: Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0572:1321 Conexant Systems (Rockwell), Inc
To get this to work, you need to have the following:
http://www.linuxant.com/drivers/dgc/downloads-installer.php

It turns out the modem is not of the HSF variety but a DGC variety (Although it eventually installs the HSF drivers) Some ALSA stuff is required as well, but the installer will take care of that..

The normal HSF drivers will NOT work. Trust me…

HOWTO:

How to detect the modem and install the driver using the installer

* Download the installation program (cnxtinstall.run)
* Open a terminal window. (If you don’t know how to do this, press ALT-F2 and in the dialog box that will appear, try entering one of the following commands: xterm or konsole or gnome-terminal)
* Use the cd command to access the directory where the cnxtinstall.run file was downloaded.
* Finally, enter the sh cnxtinstall.run command to run the installer.

At each prompt, choose ‘Yes’ and let the script run, it will download the appropriate software etc.

Once it has finished, run hsfconfig as root
sudo hsfconfig

Choose the right country [UK] and let it finish.

The modem should now work..

Well what a struggle. I had my system all set up and then, once you thought it was all done it did not work. Well the thing that did not work was being able to create calendars in Lightning. The main problem seemed to be that Lightning required some libraries that did not install if you acquire the plugin from the Mozilla add-ons site or Thunderbird add-ons

However, it is not lost, all I needed to do was to install libstdc++5 with the following line

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

Now the plugin seemed to work fine, for me at least!

Being safe nowadays means that you need to have some form of antivirus available on your system. Linux users for years have not worried about this but being naive is not an excuse.

So, to install the solution that works with Thunderbird, you need Thunderbird and an add-on called clamdrib

To make this work under Ubuntu you need a few more steps…
You need to install clamav, which is easily done with:
sudo apt-get install clamav-daemon
..or..
sudo aptitude install clamav-daemon

You also need to make one change to the /etc/clamav/clamd.conf file from the default set up on Ubuntu, adding the lines:
TCPSocket 3310
TCPAddr localhost

You can now either reboot or just stopping the services

sudo /etc/init.d/clamav-daemon restart
sudo /etc/init.d/clamav-freshclam restart

This should now work nicely..

After installing Hardy (Ubuntu 8.04) I was rather happy that it worked at first. However, using the laptop without a mouse was a bit tedious. The problem was that the touchpad would not move the cursor very far, which meant to move it required several strokes.

I finally figured it out and it was quite simple once I found this post that is an old description, but it worked for me. Essentially the problems were:

I wanted to use the TouchPad config within Ubuntu to configure the touchpad
SHM has to be enabled in the xorg.conf for the TouchPad config to work.

I changed my /etc/X11/xorg.conf as follows:


*snip*

*snip*


After a quick restart, everything was great. The cursor now moved with a dash of speed!