Getting the speakers to work on the new laptop

So I got a new laptop - an HP Pavilion tx 2000.
It dual boots Windows Vista and Ubuntu 9.04

As with many other people, while basic functionality is there, most of the special buttons don't do what they are meant to.

I'll come back to that as I get round to fixing it (I'm fairly certain that most issues can be resolved with a bit of googling).

Wireless - needed to use ndiswrapper. Much better wireless speeds than my old laptop.

Speakers - while sound worked fairly well through the computer's built-in speakers, I have a rather nice set of speakers that need to be plugged into the headphone socket. This link put me on the right track, but had the wrong (presumably out of date for this version of Ubuntu) file to edit.

For my system editing sound options in /ect/modprobe.d/alsa-base was unsuccessful, since this created a new file.

Instead use this link where the file to amend is correctly given as /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

My sound chipset is ALC861VD and the option I ended up using was the hp one.

Can't hear anything

So, all of a sudden I couldn't play music using Rhythmbox. It would open, I would click on a song and it would say it was playing, but nothing happened. The track clock stayed at zero.

Thanks to this link on the ubuntu forums, I think I have it sorted.

System->Preferences->Sound and changed all the options to ALSA. This has resulted in being able to hear music at the same time as being on the internet etc. Tracks take a couple of seconds longer to start than I am used to, but I'll monitor it for a bit and maybe look at a couple of other steps when I am not busy.

Fonts

Quick way to install a font for use in OpenOffice:

Copy the file to .fonts folder in home directory.

Close OO and reopen.

For more options see here

Flocking marvellous

Just installed Flock 2.0 beta 2. No problems except it didn't pick up my flash plugin.

Thanks to this forum page, I did the following and all now works:

go to ~/.flock and
ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins plugins

Edited March 2010 to add...
useful thing in firefox when working out where the plugins are
about:plugins

Also - how to sort out a launcher...
gedit \home\usrname\Flock.desktop

Put this text in it:
[Desktop Entry]
Version=2.5
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Flock
Comment=Flock Web Browser
Exec="/home/yourusername/flock/flock-browser"
GenericName=Flock Web Browser
Icon=/home/yourusername/flock/icons/mozicon128.png
Path=$HOME/flock
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=
Categories=Network;Application;
GenericName[en_US]=Flock Web Browser

Multiple kernels in GRUB

How to limit the number of kernels appearing in the bootloader:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=818177

I used the first option.

Upgrade to Hardy Heron

With my essays for the year out of the way, it then became time to upgrade to Hardy Heron. Since the previous upgrade went so smoothly, I decided to do another upgrade rather than a complete reinstall.

The upgrade took about two and a half hours: an hour to download and then the rest to update. If I didn't have Tex installed, I think it would have been considerably faster.

Problem: Wireless did not come back up :-(
The hardware driver wizard popped up and recommended the Broadcom B43 driver. After some initial reluctance (I have previously spent days trying to get wireless to work) and some searching in the ubuntu forums, I decided that this was probably the simplest option. Plugging in the trusty Cat 5 ethernet cable and clicking 'enable' meant that the driver was downloaded. A quick reboot and all was in order.

Alternative solutions can be found here and here and here.

It is possible that if the bandwidth via this driver is worse than I am used to I will go down the ndiswrapper route instead, but for now this will do fine.

What have I noticed that is different?
Firefox is now a late beta of version 3. Seems rather nice, particularly the list of pages that comes up when you start typing in the address bar. Needs more exploration before I can say much more about it.

New icons for OpenOffice documents. A small change, presumably OpenOffice has moved up a version too.

I'll report back on anything else I notice later.

Repartitioning went fine. No problems at all.

The update to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon also went very well, with the wireless connection coming straight back up. Just a few niggles to sort out:

1 - The mozilla thunderbird icon disappeared from the quick launch tray. Easy to reinstate.

2 - The clock settings went very strange. This is due to the machine dual booting with windows and both operating systems trying to set the computer's hardware clock to British Summer Time. Resolved in Linux by unchecking the box marked 'use UTC'

3 - Flash. I've been using the flashplugin-nonfree package. The package was still installed, but flash wasn't working. Uninstalling and reinstalling this package in synaptic got flash working again, but the next reboot brought the same problem up.

In firefox, type about:plugins into the address bar to see what plugins are installed. I found three different versions of flash installed. Made note of the dates of each version and went looking for the older versions to delete them.

The file that flashplugin-nonfree gets is called libflashplayer.so. Likely places to find it are in usr/lib/firefox/plugins, myhomedir/.mozilla/plugins, usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree

This last one was the most recent version. Deleting the other versions fixed the problem.