I’m using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and I had been having a problem related to sound. Every time I started the computer, the volume was muted and I had to un-mute it as well as increase the volume. When I searched for a solution, it was brought to my attention that Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and 10.04 Lucid Lynx also had this problem. I solved it by simply removing the buggy package alsa-utils which was responsible for this. Removing also-utils also removes ubuntu-desktop meta-package, but it does not matter since it is just a meta-package. To those who do not want to remove alsa-utils or ubuntu-desktop, some people in the Bug report have said that removing the line

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mute_and_zero_levels "$TARGET_CARD" || EXITSTATUS=1

from /etc/init.d/alsa-utils (to open, use gksu gedit /etc/init.d/alsa-utils) fixed the problem.

SBaGen is a Binaural beat generator. For more info, visit the official SBaGen Website.

It is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. For Ubuntu, it is not available in any official repos so we need to compile it from source. Here is how you can do that.

Open Synaptic Package Manager and enable universe repository if you already haven’t done so. To do so, navigate to Settings > Repositories and check Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)
Now, press Reload in Synaptic Toolbar to reload the package lists.

Now, quit Synaptic Package Manager and open up terminal. First, you will need some packages to start building our app. So lets get those.

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sudo apt-get install libvorbisidec-dev libmad0-dev

After installing required development packages, lets create a directory named sbagen where you can work with sbagen and change to it.

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mkdir sbagen
cd sbagen

Lets download sbagen-1.4.4.tgz from sbagen website:

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wget http://uazu.net/sbagen/sbagen-1.4.4.tgz

Extract it

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tar -xvzf sbagen-1.4.4.tgz

and change to that directory

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cd sbagen-1.4.4/

Now, lets copy the required files to libs directory

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cp /usr/lib/libvorbisidec.a libs/linux-libvorbisidec.a 
cp /usr/lib/libmad.a libs/linux-libmad.a

Now, to build it, you need to run the included script called mk. To do so, just execute:

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./mk

Now if you see no errors, the code must be compiled by now. You should be able to run it by doing a:

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./sbagen

If you see an output like the following:

SBaGen - Sequenced Binaural Beat Generator, version 1.4.4
Copyright (c) 1999-2007 Jim Peters, http://uazu.net/, all rights 
  reserved, released under the GNU GPL v2.  See file COPYING.
 
Usage: sbagen [options] seq-file ...
       sbagen [options] -i tone-specs ...
       sbagen [options] -p pre-programmed-sequence-specs ...
 
For full usage help, type 'sbagen -h'.  For latest version see
http://uazu.net/sbagen/ or http://sbagen.sf.net/

this means sbagen has been compiled. To be able to use it conveniently in the future, you just need to move it to some bin directory. Lets move it to /usr/local/bin

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sudo cp sbagen /usr/local/bin/

Now, you should be able to run it from any path by just invoking:

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sbagen

If you encounter any errors in any steps, please post the step and the corresponding error message in the comment box below. I will try to address the problem the best I can.

Now, after it is installed, you may want to try out an example file:

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sbagen examples/basics/prog-chakras-1.sbg

but it will give you the following error:

Can't open /dev/dsp, errno X

Please follow my other post to overcome this problem.

I usually sit in front of my PC for long hours. It is always better to have least effect on my eyes and I used to reduce the brightness and adjust colors for that. Now, I have discovered a software to do just that. It claims to adjust the screen color temperature according to the surroundings. It is called Redshift and can be installed from the PPA ppa:jonls/redshift-ppa. To install it on Karmic and Lucid, open up Synaptic and navigate to Settings>Repositories>Other Software>Add and paste in “ppa:jonls/redshift-ppa” (without quotes) and then close it, Reload the package lists by clicking Reload in the Toolbar and then search for redshift and install it. It is not available for Maverick Meerkat now, but you can install it by following my earlier post. After installation, you can run it by invoking the following command from the terminal:

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redshift -l LATITUDE:LONGITUDE

For example, since I am at Lalitpur, Nepal, I ran:

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redshift -l 27.4:85.2

You can find latitude and longitude information about your city here. If you don’t, use the one which is nearest to your place and it should work just fine. You will immediately see a change in color. You may also like it to show a tray icon so that you can disable/enable it easily if you have to. To do so, just run:

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gtk-redshift -l LATITUDE:LONGITUDE

You can toggle enable/disable by clicking on the tray icon.

You will probably want to install run it on startup. To do so, just open Startup Applications and Add an application with command as

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gtk-redshift -l LATITUDE:LONGITUDE

To see how much it is actually helping your eyes, keep it enabled for prolonged hours while you sit in front of your PC and disable it. You will see how difficult it is to see the normal color and how cool RedShift is.

Hope this helps.

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Alpha 64bit and as expected, the PPAs that I use have been disabled. When I enable them, I get 404 errors for most because they have not set up PPA for Maverick yet. But I need the packages, I need the updates to those packages.

To get them, all I need to do is edit them in Repositories > Other software. Here I just change maverick to lucid and then I can use and update those packages. If I later find that the maintainers have already set one up for Maverick, I can simply change lucid to maverick.

If you want to add a PPA that does not have a Maverick release, lets say deluge-team ppa which does not have packages for Maverick at the time of writing this, you can simply add ppa:deluge-team/ppa and then edit it to change maverick to lucid. That should do it.

This is not a recommended procedure but it works and has always worked for me.

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Alpha has been available for download a few days back and I have decided to upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx 64bit to 10.10. I’m sure there are no notable changes in the first alpha, but it is great to have it installed as changes are seen easy and I can help in development by reporting bugs and trying to fix some issues on my own.

To upgrade, I had to launch Synaptic and navigate to Settings>Repositories>Updates>Release Upgrade>Show new distribution releases>Normal Releases and then close the dialog and then update the package list. Run

update-manager -d

from the run dialog (Alt+F2) and in that box it says “New Upgrade release ’10.10′ is available”, click on Upgrade and there we go.

I had posted about flash plugin controls not working in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala 64 bit here. I had moved to Ubuntu 32 bit for quite sometime and recently made a move back to Ubuntu 64 bit. I found the same problem with flash plugin controls in Ubuntu 64 bit. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I haven’t found any specific patterns to when it does and when it doesn’t. If someone has, please do share.

In my previous post regarding the issue, I had suggested the installation of Adobe flash player 64 bit version from Adobe Labs website. The solution worked fine for me and it seems for most of the others, but the plugin was experimental and when someone needed to update, it was not available via repositories. It has been provided in a launchpad ppa repository currently which can be added by adding ppa:sevenmachines/ppa to Repositories in Synaptic, but it seems it is not updated as of now and the latest version available in the ppa is 10.0.45.2 while Adobe has already released version 10.1rc4. But since the latest version is not recognized by youtube, I think we should stay with the version in the repository.

Simply open up synaptic and navigate to Settings>Repositories>Other Software and click on Add. In the apt-line, enter ppa:sevenmachines/flash and close it. Then Click on the Reload button. Now, search for flashplugin64-installer, mark it for installation and click on apply.

When done, restart firefox and flash should run fine.

Please share your flash player 10 experience in Linux.

Ubuntu 10.10 Marvick Meerkat has been announced at Shuttleworth’s Blog today, April 2, 2010 which should be released in October 2010.

It will probably have loads of new features that have been held back in Lucid Lynx since it is LTS (Long Term Support) version. I will probably be trying it out from the 1st Alpha release and keep you updated about the feature additions (what’s new) and changes. I think Maverick will feature gnome-shell, rgba support and more.

GIMP 2.7.1 added Single Window Mode and GIMP 2.7.x can now be installed via PPA. It is available here for Jaunty, Karmic and Lucid. I have Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx installed and I installed GIMP 2.7.3 unstable. Here is how you can do it, but if you use it for production, you might want to wait for final stable release.

GIMP 2.7 in Ubuntu

Launch Synaptic Package Manager and click Settings>Repositories>Other Software and then Add

ppa:matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn

. Reload the software list and mark for upgrades. That will install GIMP 2.7 and you can enable the Single Window Mode by navigating to Window>Single Window Mode.

I upgraded my packages in my Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 1 installation and it required a restart. I did not realize that there was no space left on the root partition (I have two partitions, root / and /home). I restarted and was not able to login. I got a message saying something like

The configuration defaults for GNOME power manager have not been installed correctly. Please contact your computer administrator

in the Login window. I tried logging in again, but I again got blank screen and was logged back out. Nor did the message make any sense.

I pressed Ctrl+Alt+F1 and logged in there and then tried to upgrade the packages using

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

There were upgrades available and installed them I saw mandb complaining about the lack of disk space. I then freed some space by deleting some files I had kept in the root directory and pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart and it booted in without problems. If you face this problem and want to free some space, you can use

sudo apt-get clean

which will free the space used by package archives cache which are located at /var/cache/apt/archives and it should boot without problems.

After update the indicator-session applet stopped appearing in my Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. I don’t know how it happened, but I saw that the indicator-session applet had been uninstalled. I marked indicator-applet-complete in synaptic and installed it. Then it started appearing after restart.