The Linux Experiment

Hi Everyone,

Now that I have a relatively stable environment, I just wanted to write an update of how things went, and some issues that I ran into while installing my desktop environment.

No Sound

Not that I was expecting anything different from LFS, but I had no sound upon booting into KDE. I found this quite strange, as alsamixer was showing my sound card fine. One thing I can tell you, is that alsaconf is a filthy liar. My sound is now working, and it still says it can’t find my card. I’m not sure how I got it working, but here are a few tips.

• Make sure your sound is un-muted in alsamixer.
• Check your kernel to make sure that either support is compiled in for your card, or module support is selected.
• If you selected module supprt, make sure the modules are loaded. For me, this was snd-hda-intel.

Firefox and Adobe Flash

I’m not going to go into too many details about Firefox, as Jake covered this in his post here, but I’d like to note that installing Flash into Firefox was quite easy. All I had to do was download the .tar.gz from Adobe, and do the following:

tar -xvf flash.tar.gz (or whatever the .tar.gz is called)

cd flash

cp libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins (make sure plugins is created if it does not exist.)

KDE Crash On Logout

The first time I tried to logout of KDE, I noticed that it crashed. After doing some investigations, I found a solution here. You want to edit your $KDE4_PREFIX/share/config/kdm/kdmrc to reflect the following:

[X-:*-Core]
…
TerminateServer=true

What’s Next?

I’m actually not sure what I’m going to do next. I suppose I should get VLC running on the system, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. I now have a working web browser, flash, and sound, which should be fine until I can get other things working.

I mentioned in the podcast that I was having problems viewing Flash stuff in Firefox and I blamed it on KDE. I may have jumped the gun here, because the same issue started cropping up in GNOME. I went on the Linux Mint forums and other users were having similar issues. I’ve run the code that they suggested in the terminal, but I’m not sure if it worked because the problem doesn’t manifest instantly – sometimes it takes over half an hour before websites that run flash white themselves out.

I swear that I’ve encountered this before…

That is all.

Even though the Debian community is very strict about only allowing free software in their repositories, my Iceweasel install came preloaded with Macromedia Flash 9. Regardless of whether this is how things are supposed to be, Flash has since moved on to version 10. Some sites like youtube are already warning users who have lower versions installed that they should upgrade for performance reasons, and Firefox is going to begin to prompt users to upgrade for security reasons.

Regardless of your motivations, having the latest Flash plugin is essential to today’s internet experience, regardless of well placed free software ideals. Luckily, I’ve found a handy tutorial (incredibly, it’s on the Debian Wiki and isn’t horribly out of date) that gives instructions on how to get the latest Flash installed on a Debian system.

It should be noted that the tutorial requires the user to add a non-free repository to their sources list, located in /etc/apt/sources.list file, and that making this change will techinically make your system non stable, in the sense that it will no longer be officially supported by the Debian community. While regrettable, my sources list already contained non-free sources list, as some of my hardware lacks free drivers/firmware, so I’m not terribly concerned.