<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.12.1"> </HEAD> <BODY> I had my laptop working pretty well under Dapper. I decided, after months of watching and waiting, that perhaps now Edgy, with all fixes, etc. in the repos, was likely to not cause trouble for me. I backed up my system, popped in my Edgy disk and did a complete install from the ground up. (I had tried an upgrade, but it didn't like something I did in the past and vomited as a result.) Now my laptop is in a shambles. First, of course, the bug with my laptop's sound card and video card hasn't been touched. This is no surprise. So I hand-edited my xorg.conf file to add the appropriate driver and gave up on the internal sound card again. After all I still have my external sound card, right? Wrong. Apparently there's been a regression in the USB Sound Blaster support. And it's a particularly strange one. Rhythmbox (and only Rhythmbox) can play sound out the external sound card. Absolutely nothing else can. I don't get the startup sound, the login sound, the logout sound, sound events from GAIM, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and this only if I go into System->Preferences->Sound and switch it from "Autodetect" (or "ALSA" under Sound Capture) to "USB Audio" on the Devices tab. Oh, and I get the test tones from "Sound Playback" on the Sound Events, Music and Movies and Audio Conferencing sections. Again only if I specify "USB Audio", though. Sound Capture, no matter what the setting, generates this error: "gconfaudiosrc ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink profile=chat: Could not open resource for writing." The rest, when "Autodetect" is set, generate this instead: "audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink: Could not open resource for writing." So I can listen to music, but I can't do much else. (Like, it seems, listen to the audio in movies. But more on that below.) Now something odd shows up that I only caught by accident. When I run a GNOME app in a shell, say gedit, I get some pretty bizarre verbiage: $ gedit ALSA lib confmisc.c:670:(snd_func_card_driver) cannot find card '0' ALSA lib conf.c:3479:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_card_driver returned error: No such device ALSA lib confmisc.c:391:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating strings ALSA lib conf.c:3479:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat returned error: No such device ALSA lib confmisc.c:1070:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating name ALSA lib conf.c:3479:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such device ALSA lib conf.c:3947:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such device ALSA lib pcm.c:2146:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM default I found this by accident. I'm sure that the system is trying to tell me something, but I can't make heads nor tails of it. It seems to be trying to open "card 0" and not finding it. This is no surprise since there is no card0 in /proc/asound. It's called card1 there for some reason. $ ll total 1.0K dr-xr-xr-x 4 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 card1/ -r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 cards -r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 devices -r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 hwdep -r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 modules lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 5 2007-02-07 19:42 MP3 -> card1/ dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 oss/ -r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 pcm dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 seq/ -r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 timers -r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2007-02-07 19:42 version $ cat cards 1 [MP3 ]: USB-Audio - Sound Blaster MP3+ Creative Labs Sound Blaster MP3+ at usb-0000:00:03.3-7.1, full speed I'm guessing that this is why audio is so unstable for me. How would I go about getting ALSA to look at card 1 or rename card 1 to card 0? This leaves me with my final problem. I have a lot of AVIs encoded in, it turns out, DivX5 format. I've downloaded all the gstreamer packages from main,restricted,universe,multiverse and I've downloaded the Win32 codecs and have them installed. Not a single one of my video applications can read the files, however. This despite the fact that I was watching those very same files under Dapper only two or three nights ago. Which of the codec packages did I miss and where would I go looking for it/them? (I did a google on "DivX 5 Ubuntu" and on "Xvid codec Ubuntu" but got nothing heartening. A lot of "we do not support this"-style messages or pointers to codecs I already have installed. And I know that this was supported not all that long ago given that I, as I said, used to watch these movies.) So I'm stuck here with two outstanding questions: 1. How do I get ALSA to look in the right place, or to name the USB card properly? 2. How do I get my DivX5-encoded movies working under Ubuntu? </BODY> </HTML>