Sound With Ubuntu 7.10 On A Dell Latitude D830
I managed to get sound working using Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy beta) on my Dell Latitude D830 a few weeks ago but hadn’t documented it. I didn’t document it because I basically hacked out a solution that involved compiling a kernel of my own and including the Intel HDA driver in the kernel (rather than as a module like it is by default). This also meant that wireless and such didn’t work which was actually okay because during the day I wanted sound to listen to music but at night at home, I didn’t need sound but required wireless. So essentially i had a big hack that involved me choosing the right kernel to boot from at startup. Not an ideal solution.
But I see now from this bug report that the problem was indeed with the ALSA driver and it’s now been fixed upstream. Unfortunately there’s no update to the Ubuntu packages as of yet but at least now there is a fix that is much less of a hack.
First, grab the latest snapshot source from the ALSA site and extract the file. I grabbed the August 21, 2007 snapshot.
% wget ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/alsa/snapshot/driver/alsa-driver-hg20070821.tar.bz2 % tar xvpjf alsa-driver-hg20070821.tar.bz2
Then change into the new directory, configure the build and install the driver files. It is important to note that until this is fixed, you will likely have to do this everytime the Ubuntu kernel is updated.
./configure --with-cards=hda-intel make sudo make install
After the drivers are installed, reboot and sound will now magically work.
New Roller - Now With Tags
I finally got around to installing the new version of Apache Roller (formerly called Roller Weblogger), which has now been accepted as an Apache Software Foundation project. The new version has a bunch of new features but the most noticeable of these features is the ability to tag entries. Tagging is a feature available to most other bloggers for quite a while now so it is nice to be able to join the masses. I’m not sure if I will bother going back in time and tagging all my past entries but perhaps I will tag some of the better entries I’ve written.
Update: Of course, none of the themes (either the defaults or the extra, downloadable ones) have support for tags so in order to display the tags for an entry, a tag cloud or a search box for finding entries by tag I will have to manually modify my current theme. Sigh.
