Original February 14, 2009: Poor Man’s Tiling Window Manager is uh_no_hu’s attempt to add basic tiling window functionality to the desktop, independent of the used desktop environment or window manager. It is known to work with pekwm,  openbox and metacity. It’s a small python script that should be assigned to key combinations and currently provides 4 features:

• tiling – the basic tiling layout: one window in the main column (left) with all the other windows at the side (right)
• left – put the active window to the left
• right – put the active window the the right
• swap – swich the active window with the window in the main column

The wanted option is to be provided as an argument of the python script. The script relies on wmctrl and xdotool so make sure you have these two packages. Otherwise the script will not work.

The left/right option is somewhat similar to a function of the new Windows 7 that sticks a window the side. Tiling and swap are the classic features that come with a true tiling window manager.

Though it is not a full replacement for true tiling window managers, it can be considered as an add-on for regular window managers. Whereas someone will use a true tiling window manager (dwm, xmonad, awesome, wmii, ..) to get full tiling support, someone less technical should really try out this easy to use script because most, if not all true tiling window managers tend to be difficult to configure/use.

To give you an idea of how the tiling layout looks like, here’s a nice picture:

I remember from my earlier usage of Vista that I’m better off with a clean install on my Sony Vaio SZ6. Laptop manufacturers like Sony simply put too much bloat on their pre-installed Vista installations. I really don’t need all this trial software: office, antivirus software, … It’s all there slowing down the performance and it’s even harder to remove. The installation itself went very well. Barely any user input is required to complete the installation. The only thing I noticed is that I couldn’t find a hard disk partinioner. Odd, but not that much of a big deal either.

While the installation of Vista itself was a breeze (credit where credit’s due), installing the Sony drivers was far from easy. Sony uses a lot of custom drivers for their laptops which can be downloaded from their site. First you have to figure out in what order they have to be installed in order to make everything work like it’s supposed to (Sony neglects to mention that). When you finally figured it out, you can start searching for the devices they belong too. Then I ask myself why people complain about a linux installation. Granted, when Vista is already configured by the manufacturer it’s not much of a hassle, but doing it yourself requires much more knowledge than the average user has.

Next is the update process. Is it just me or does downloading and installing all the updates take forever? Note the retorical aspect of this question. Maybe I’m spoiled because of the fast linux mirrors, but there’s no excuse for the time it takes on Vista. Then you have the renowned restarting of the updates, famous only in the realm of Microsoft. I’m already over the fact that I have to restart, but certainly not over the fact that it takes forever to complete the installation of the updates.

The first day I was using Vista again, I wasn’t happy at all. It felt very slow and there was this enormous unknown disk activity. I later found out it was just indexing my files, looking for updates, defragmenting my disk (why is that even necessary right after a clean install?), … but I really don’t like things happening without me knowing of it. Luckily the slowness and disk activity went away shortly thereafter. It’s almost as if Vista heavily relies on caching to achieve some speed. Not that I mind though, that’s what system resources are for.

Vista has some good qualities as well though. The User Acces Control for instance is a major step ahead. Ironically, that’s what regular Vista users complain most about. The Microsoft developers might have to reprioritize their UAC focus (why would I need admin privileges to drag, drop and delete items in my very own start menu?) but all in all UAC really is a good thing.

Something linux lacks and Vista doesn’t, is the support of every manufacter on this globe. You never have to wonder if this will work, because it will (well, maybe not on vista 64 bit :p). There’s also no lack of good software. It’s not always free as in beer or speech, but it’s certainly good. Microsoft Office for example really outperforms Openoffice or any other office suit on linux.

In the end, Vista doesn’t make me go away from Arch Linux but I’ll still use it once in a while because it’s not that bad after all.

This leaves me with another question: What tiling window manager to choose? I’ve heared about most of them already while browsing the Arch Linux forum and started with dwm, known as the easiest tiling window manager to configure. Indeed, the configuration is fairly easy but it doesn’t resemble to the simplicity of GNOME or KDE at all. If you don’t read about it first, you start dwm and you’re left with nothing but an empty screen without even knowing how to run an application. While it is supposed to be easy, I still had some unresolved problems with naming my tags/workspaces and shifting windows to it. Though my incompetence is probably to blame, the developers’ unwillingness to document their work didn’t really help me either so I abandoned dwm. The second in line to try was Awesome. It’s very popular and probably the most feature rich one. Configuration is done in the programming language lua. Oddly enough I had a lot more success configuring it than dwm. A notorious downside of Awesome is its ever changing configuration syntax. While this is supposedly going to improve now lua is introduced, I’m not willing to put it to the test.

Opposed to the previous two, my experience with XMonad is a success story all the way. I believe XMonad outranks the others easily. Configuration is done in Haskell. While it’s perhaps not an easy way to configure things, it  allows  great flexibility. The developers have extensively documented each feature, illustrate a lot with simple examples and created a great faq that answers the  most important questions that come to mind. XMonad runs very smoothly and on top of everything, it can be easily integrated with every popular desktop environment. That last feature is a huge bonus. It simply replaces metacity (the window manager of GNOME) with XMonad. While this can be done with the other tiling window managers too, XMonad integrates very nicely in GNOME and handles the communcation between the two very well. I get the best of both worlds with no downsides. Well, there’s adownside, only not for me. It is required to install the +/- 100 MB Haskell compiler. Luckily for me, I need Haskell for my university courses.

First we need a recent version of dvdread and dvdnav, two libraries that allow us to view and navigate through dvd menus. We start with dvdread. Again, you will probably have a very old version of dvdread, so we get a recent version. Dvdread depends on libdvdcss so make sure you have it. You will also need the tools to compile from source of course.

1. Get the source:
wget http://www7.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/dvdnav/libdvdread-4.1.3.tar.bz2
2. Unpack it and navigate to the directory:
tar xvfj libdvdread-4.1.3.tar.bz2
cd libdvdread-4.1.3
3. Compile, build and install:
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Now we do the same for dvdnav:

1. Get the source:
wget http://www8.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/dvdnav/libdvdnav-4.1.3.tar.bz2
2. Unpack it and navigate to the directory:
tar xvfj libdvdnav-4.1.3.tar.bz2
cd libdvdnav-4.1.3.tar.bz2
3. Compile, build and install:
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Now that we have everything to read a dvd and its dvd menu, it’s time to install mplayer with this functionality.

1. Get the source:
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
2. Navigate to the directory:
cd mplayer
3. Compile, build and install. There are a lot of configuration options available for mplayer, but I will only mention the ones you need to enable dvd menus.

./configure --disable-dvdread-internal --enable-dvdnav
make
sudo make install

Now hurry up and try out some fancy dvd menu with mplayer. Here are a few of The Terminal:

Mpd and ncmpc++ are perfect examples of these console programs. Mpd, also known as Music Player Daemon, is a powerful server side console application for playing music and ncmpc++ is one of the many console front-ends available for mpd (note that gui front-ends also exist). Mpd is cross-platform (although windows support is in a very experimental phase) and can also be controlled from an external device like a mobile phone. This makes it an ideal combination for a media server: your phone or other device as a remote control for your sound system running mpd. If you paid attention to what I said, you’ll conclude that mpd does not stream audio. I repeat: mpd does not stream audio. All playback occurs on the server. However, you output to a stream server like Icecast. Besides that, it also makes a great desktop music player program where both mpd and ncmpc++ are installed on the same computer. Inspired by K.Mandla‘s  “how to become a pro at ..” I will show you how to do so and become a “pro” at using mpd and ncmpc++.

Setting Up mpd
First, you will need to install mpd. Every self respecting linux distribution has it in their software repositories, hence the installation of the package shouldn’t be a problem. For Ubuntu it would be “sudo apt-get install mpd”, for Arch Linux “sudo pacman -S mpd” and so on. For more information on installing mpd, you can always check out their extensive wiki: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Install. The few configuration changes that have to be made, are done in /etc/mpd.conf for system-wide use, or in ~/.mpdconf for individual users. I will only explain setting it up for each individual user as it has several advantages over a system wide install such as setting up a separate music library, own playlists and resume of songs for each user individually.

1. Copy the system wide configuration file /etc/mpd.conf to ~/.mpdconf (~ denotes the users home directory):

cp /etc/mpd.conf ~/.mpdconf

2. Before we edit the config file, we will create some files and directories we will be using later on:

mkdir -p ~/.mpd/playlists
touch ~/.mpd/mpd.db
touch ~/.mpd/mpd.error
touch ~/.mpd/log

3. Now edit ~/.mpdconf to reflect these settings:

music_directory                 "/full/path/to/your/music/directory"
playlist_directory              "~/.mpd/playlists"
db_file                         "~/.mpd/mpd.db"
log_file                        "~/.mpd/mpd.log"
error_file                      "~/.mpd/mpd.error"
pid_file                        "~/.mpd/mpd.pid"
state_file                      "~/.mpd/mpdstate"
bind_to_address                 "127.0.0.1"
port                            "6600"

As you will see, there are two entries for each setting: one system wide and one user based. You have to comment out the system wide ones with # and enable the user based by uncommenting them and filling in the correct values (like mine above). The names of the settings speak for themselves and additional documentation is often added in the configuration file itself. Be sure to replace /full/path/to/your/music/directory with the correct path to your music directory and yourusername with your actual username. You can change the port if you want to, but there’s generally no point in doing that. You can also restrict access to mpd (remember, you can control it from a remote device) by uncommenting the password entry and supplying a password. Typically, you don’t have to mess with the audio output settings, but if you have problems later on remember these settings: Uncommenting the alsa output is then your best bet (since it ships with basically every linux distribution by default as it is included in the kernel).

There also exists a configuration page on their wiki.

Using mpd
Now that you have mpd installed and configured, you can start using it. There really isn’t much to say about using mpd. All you have to do is running the command mpd as user and creating the music library database file. It will look into your music_directory, create an entry for each music file and put information about it in mpd.db:

mpd --create-db
mpd

The cool thing about having a command line music player daemon is that you don’t need a X server running to play music. Are you tired of your music stopping when you log on and off your system? No problem, mpd will keep running when you log on and off. When you start mpd it will also resume the last song that was playing if you abruptly stopped the mpd daemon.

If mpd gives you any trouble like not starting up, no sound or not creating a mpd.db file, check out mpd.log and mpd.error. It will give you a headstart in figuring out what’s wrong.

Setting up ncmpc++
Now we still need something to control mpd with. Ncmpcpp is almost an exact clone of ncmpc but it contains some new features ncmpc doesn’t have. It’s been also rewritten from scratch in C++ and more importantly, it’s actively being developped. As I told before, there exist other clients both command line and graphical as web based. Hell, you can even get a client that runs on your Iphone or Ipod Touch. But I can assure you, ncmpc++ pretty much does it all: playlists, crossfading, tag editing, fetching lyrics… You name it, it’s got it.

As far as I know only Arch Linux, Gentoo and FreeBSD have ncmpcpp in their software repositories. So you might have to get your hands dirty with compiling it yourself. But hey, if you already get so far reading this, it really shouldn’t be a problem. People seriously considering a console music player, probably have the skill to compile it as well. Detailed installation instructions can be found on the ncmpcpp site.

I’m not really going into the configuration of ncmpc++. The default configuration will certainly do. Only when you intend to use the tag editor, you will have to set the proper path to the mpd music directory in ~/.ncmpcpp/config (the path you also filled in the config file of mpd). The rest is a bunch of color and format settings. You can also configure the shortcut keys in ~/.ncmpcpp/keys. More on the shortcut keys later.

Using ncmpc++
You can launch ncmpc++ in the terminal with:

ncmpcpp

When you launch it, you are welcomed by the playlist window that shows the songs of the playlist you are currently listening to

At the top, you see what menus are available and their corresponding key to access it (by default numbers from 1 to 7 and fn keys):
1:Help
2:Playlist
3:Browse
4:Search
5:Library
6:Playlist editor
7:Tag editor

The meaning of these menus are pretty obvious. A quick way to switch from the playlist to the browse menu and back is the tab key. The global keys to use in each menu are the arrow up and down to navigate and enter to select. To go to the parent directory you can use backspace. To start a selected song, press enter, s to stop a song and P to pause. > and < are used to go forward and backward one track. r is used to enable/disable repeat mode and z for random selection of the songs in the playlist. Deleting a song in your playlist can be done with d and clearing the whole playlist with c. You can increase and decrease the volume with + and -. If you want to quit ncmpc++, press q. As you can see, the shortcut keys somehow make sense, they mostly are the first character of the action you want to perform. Very easy to remember although it can be a bit overwhelming the first time.

When you stored a new music file in your music directory, you will have to update mpd’s database. I told you before that you can use this command:

mpd --create-db

but ncmpc++ also has this functionality, accessible with u. So absolutely no need to quit ncmpcpp.

The previous short cuts were just the basic commands to get you started. This was only the beginning. You can for example cross-fade from one song to another with x. Fetching lyrics is l, looking up detailed information on the performing artist is I. The latter two perform a search on the internet. It’s possible it doesn’t find a match on the net, but that’s only the case with less known, most time local artist and songs. I tried it with some local artists from my country and it only missed one out of many. Another information key i gives you information about the music file itself such as file name and tags. You can go out of the lyrics, artist and file information screens by pressing the same button.

I’ll quickly look into searching your music database. If you have a playlist with a lot of songs or you have hundreds of artists, it’s very annoying to use the slow navigate arrow up and down key. You can instead do a quick forward and backward search with / and ?. If you want to perform a more complex search, you can always use the search menu (4 or F4) but I find that takes a lot of time and I don’t think a lot of people use it.

Integrated with ncmpc++ is an advanced tag editor. It’s one of the few command line players for mpd that have this. With this you can edit whatever tag you want of a music file in your database. The usage speaks for itself. As I told before, to get this functionality to work, you will have to supply the path the music directory in ~/.ncmpcpp/config.

All of the shortcut keys are configurable in ~/.ncmpcpp/keys. If you are unhappy with a certain key, you can change each one of them in that file.

This is as far as I’m willing to go with covering ncmpcpp’s functionality. I believe I’ve summed up the most important things. Feel free to notify me of other things I have overlooked. All the functionality and how to access them should be listed in the help menu (1 or F1).

“CrossOver Linux allows you to install many popular Windows productivity applications, plugins and games in Linux, without needing a Microsoft Operating System license. CrossOver includes an easy to use, single click interface, which makes installing a Windows application simple and fast. Once installed, your application integrate seamlessly with your Gnome or KDE environment. Just click and run your application, exactly as you would in Windows, but with the full freedom of Linux.

CrossOver Linux lets you use many Windows plugins directly from your Linux browser. Plugins work on any x86 based Linux distribution and will integrate with most browsers including Firefox 1.x, Netscape 6.x, Konqueror, Mozilla, and Opera. CrossOver also integrates with Gnome and KDE to let you transparently open any Word, Excel or PowerPoint file. But even better, you can open these attachment types directly from any mail client.”

I wonder if I will ever use it since I’m already accustomed to free open source alternatives for such applications. Only future can tell.

Only one minor issue emerged during the upgrade, specifically gdm (login manager) not finding the root user, hence failing to run. Then I remembered having locked down / disabled my root account with passwd -l. A quick search on the Arch Forums revealed the solution: passwd –unlock root && usermod –lock root. Another problem I discovered rather quicly is an issue with the unlocking of your screen with gnome-screensaver. The background of the unlock screen always falls back to the default background in gnome instead of the current one. A temporary fix is to replace the default background with the current one.

I’m not going to sum up every new feature that comes with 2.24 (you can find it here: http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.24/), but here are some things I noticed rightaway:

• Revert item in trash to original location – I already wondered why it took so long to get such a simple feature. It’s not that I’m going to use it since I never delete items that I don’t want to, but it’s nice to have.
• The archive manager to unzip, untar, … files now shows a nice progress bar and an option to navigate to the target location when the process is complete. It’s strange how a minor change can improve usability a lot.
• Tabbed file browsing in nautilus – one of the so-called big features of this release. I haven’t get used to it yet (old habits never die, right?) but I might find it more useful than opening several window in the future.
• An overal speed improvement while working. During my initial comparisons, it seems to consume less memory as well.

The favourite appliance for most people is to obscure their illegal torrent traffic but they often don’t realise it can also be used to block spam, adware and hijacked systems part of a bot network, a far more useful purpose. The available block lists with their description are (I might have missed one or two):

• Microsoft: This list covers all the known Microsoft Corp ranges.
  It also covers all their known associated IP ranges from around the world.
• Ads-trackers-and-bad-pr0n: This list contains advertising trackers and a short list of bad/intrusive porn sites. Use this list if you want to block advertising items that appear on websites while you surf.
• Bogon: This list is automatically generated daily from a list published at CompleteWhois. Bogons is the name used to describe IP blocks not allocated by IANA and RIRs to ISPs and organizations plus all other IP blocks that are reserved for private or special use by RFCs (the actual term bogons comes from word bogus, as in bogus IP announcements). As these IP blocks are not allocated or specially reserved, such IP blocks should not be routable and used on the internet, however some of these IP blocks do appear on the net primarily used by those individuals and organizations that are often specifically trying to avoid being identified and are often involved in such activities as DoS attacks, email abuse, hacking and other security problems. These activities obviously pose great danger to everyone and ISPs should try to filter all these bad IP routes and we are trying to help in that by working to create complete detailed list of unassigned bogon ips based on whois data.
• Dshield: This list contains known Hackers and such people in it. More information can be found at the DShield Website.
• Edu: This list contains all known Educational Institutions – University IP ranges.
• Fornonlancomputers: Non-LAND list 0.*, 10.* and 192.168.*.
• Hijacked: This list is automatically updated from CompleteWhois. Hijacked IP space are IP blocks that are being used without permission by organizations that have no relation to original organization (or its legal successor) that received the IP block. In essence it’s stealing of somebody else’s IP resources.
• Iana-multicast: IANA multicast addresses.
• Iana-private: IANA private addresses.
• Level1: This list blocks known anti-p2p companies. It contains p2p trackers like Mediasentry, Mediaforce, and known fake p2p file sources from companies like Overpeer. The list also contains all known Government – Military – Science – Research Labs and Bad Education facilities IP addresses collected by the Bluetack Team. Basically this list will block all kinds of internet connections that most people would rather not have during their internet travels.
• Level2: The Level 2 blocklist includes Banks, Financial Institutions, Corporations etc…
• Level3: This list contains ranges that don’t fit into the Level1 or Level2 Lists. This ranges are minor threads but some people don’t like those ranges to connect to them. Be aware that you might block at lot of stuff while surfing with this list. Akamai server, Yahoo ranges, dodgy ISP’s for example are part of this list.
• Proxy: Tor and miscellaneous proxies.
• Spider: This list is intended to be used by webmasters to block hostile spiders from their web sites. Automated software programs also known as spiders or bots, survey the Web and build their databases for search engines and some are used to track people down to automatically serve them with copyright violation notices.
• Spyware: This list is a compilation of known malicious SPYWARE and ADWARE IP Address ranges. It is compiled from various sources, including other available Spyware Blacklists, HOSTS files, from research found at many of the top Anti-Spyware forums, logs of Spyware victims and also from the Malware Research Section here at Bluetack.
• Temp: This is a list of people who have been reported for bad deeds in p2p. Having files that contain viruses and many other things.

A hell of a list, but quite useful too. If you’re not into the whole “command line thing”, there also exists a graphical user friendly front-end called Mobloquer.

Most linux distributions allow you to install moblock with their package manager, otherwise you have to compile it yourself. Ubuntu has extensively documented information about moblock. You can find it here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MoBlock. When you start moblock, it is likely you don’t have a internet connection anymore as moblock is blocking it. You can get your internet back by whitelisting your local area network, for example192.168.0.0/24 . It is also possible to access ip addresses that are included in the block lists through a specific port. In order to do so, you have to white list it. As mentioned before, configuration can be done in the terminal (by edithing /etc/moblock/moblock.conf) or in mobloquer.

Emesene
Yet another chat program. I used pidgin before, a multi protocol chat program, but now I switched to Emesene following one of the basic principles of linux “Make one program for a specific task and make sure it does the job well”. It is solely for the MSN protocol and I can tell you, it does the job very well. It includes everything you’d want from a chat client except for voice chat and webcam support. But then again, only aMSN has those features and I despise aMSN (no offence to the creator though).

Gnome-MPlayer
A video player based upon the superiour MPlayer. Though there are a lot of front-ends for MPlayer in circulation (gmplayer, SMPlayer, …), its approach is different from everything else: Keep it simple and stupid (KISS). You won’t find any fancy features here and the configuration menu is trimmed to the strict necessary options. If you do want to change more options, you can still directly put it into the .mplayer configuration file. Note that, in spite of the name, it doesn’t have gnome dependencies so you can safely use it in your openbox or fluxbox setup. It doesn’t consume much ram either. It also comes with a browser media plugin (gecko-mplayer) so you can see media in your browser directly.

Mirage
A lightweight image viewer. I don’t have much to say about this one. It’s just a lot better than …let’s say the bloated F-Spot.

Midori
I don’t use this web browser as I probably will never abandon my beloved Firefox, but it is certainly worth mentioning this lightweight juwel in the world of web browsing dominated by Opera and Firefox. It uses the fast webkit render engine, acquiring 100/100 on the acid3 test. Despite being in a “pre-alpha” stage (it has version 0.0.21 as of writing), its performance is very promessing. I’m sure we will hear a lot more about Midori in the future.

Rtorrent
With no doubt the best torrent client around. It is a terminal application and very lightweight as well. It includes all the features you’d want from a torrent client: encryption, DHT, bandwith and peer throttling, torrent resuming, …It can also monitor a directory for torrents. When there are torrent files in it, it will start them automatically. Nifty huh.

Mpd and ncmpc
To confirm the cliché, I couldn’t but mention this one too. A console music player. It is a lot more than just a music player. Mpd allows you to control the music on a computer remotely, or in other words, you can start/stop music, manage playlists and a lot more on a computer remotely. Ideal for integration with a stereo system.

Gedit
Obviously I knew this one already. It is the default text editor in GNOME. What I didn’t know is that there exists a latex plugin for it as well. Not only syntax highlighting, but also command completion and compile/preview buttons are included. Bye bye Kile, hello Gedit! No more KDE dependencies on my computer.

• Operating System: Arch Linux
• GTK: Customized Ubuntu Human
• Window Manager: Metacity Theme Chocolate
• Icons: Ubuntu Human Icon Set
• Wallpaper: Flying Penguins

I’ve fnally removed Compiz. The shiny effects a lot of linux users show off with are far from productive and get boring after a while. For the record, the music player is Banshee.

Arch Linux has several advantages over Ubuntu, at least to me. First of all, there’s no easy to use graphical installer. It uses a ncurse-based console installer where you have to configure everything yourself – allowing me to learn more about how linux works under the hood (although Arch uses more of a BSD-style of configuration files). It forces you to think about every step in the installation process. Second, Arch is a lot faster than Ubuntu. Because you have to install it from scratch and configure it yourself, you install what you need to make Arch work on your computer only and optimize it to suit your needs. That way you’re not fed up with unused packages and libraries like Ubuntu. Third, Arch is a rolling release distribution. This means you have to install it only once and from then on you can use the package manager (pacman) to keep your system updated. This is opposed to Ubuntu, where there is a 6 month release cycle. And last but not least, Arch has a great package manager. I’m very picky about package managers. They have to be fast, resolve dependencies and easy to use. I’ve been used to apt, my favorite package manager that comes with Ubuntu. Luckily pacman does the job in a similar, even faster way as apt.

One ‘downside’ of Arch is that the documentation, support and community isn’t as big as Ubuntu. Now don’t get me wrong. Arch has a great, but limited documentation wiki. The community is small but friendly and willing to help. Luckily linux is linux. Instructions given for one distribution, say Ubuntu, can easily be adapted for Arch if you’re experienced enough.

Hopefully my Arch system will last even longer than Ubuntu. Next in line is my Sony Vaio SZ61/XNC. May the installation of Arch on my laptop be as smooth as on my desktop.

1. Introduction
2. Prerequisites
3. Compilation and Installation
4. Uninstall
5. Troubleshooting

1. Introduction

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, known by the acronym ALSA, is a linux kernel component providing device drivers for sound cards. It replaced the original Open Sound System (OSS) since v2.6 of the linux kernel, while still providing backwards compatibility for it. Among the ALSA features you find:

• Efficient support for all type of audio interfaces, covering most sound cards from consumer sound cards to professional audio interfaces.
• Fully modularized sound drivers.
• SMP and thread-save design.
• User space library (alsa-lib)

On a side note I have to mention that OSS, now developed by 4Front Technologies, is not a deprecated project at all as some of you may think. The latest version as of writing is OSSv4 and a full alternative for ALSA. You might want to use it if you are using a Creative X-Fi sound card. These sound cards are not supported by alsa yet. OSSv4 on the contrary already supports it with beta drivers.

Most linux distributions, including Ubuntu, have ALSA packages, which you can install/reinstall with the package manager that comes with your distribution. These packages should already have been installed since ALSA is by default the sound component in the kernel as mentioned before. In some cases, the sound on a newly installed or updated system doesn’t work and as a last resort you might have to install the drivers manually. Other sound cards require a later version of ALSA to work. Before you go all the way into freak mode and compile the alsa drivers manually (not that it is hard by the way), I suggest you troubleshoot your current setup first. See the Troubleshooting Section at the end of this guide for more information.

This guide is intended on compiling the alsa drivers manually as a last resort. This should not interfere with the current installed alsa packages. The effects are completely reversible and are explained in the Uninstall Section. Now let’s head on with the actual installation.

2. Prerequisites

Step 1 Download the latest version of the following components from the alsa-project website (do not pick the release candidates unless it is really the first version that includes support for your sound card):

• alsa-driver
• alsa-lib
• alsa-utils

Step 2 Install the required packages and kernel headers:
sudo aptitude install build-essential libncurses-dev gettext linux-headers-`uname -r`

Step 3 Setup the installation directory, navigate to the it, copy and unpack the archives (I will be assuming you have downloaded the archives in your home directory, otherwise replace it with the directory where the packages are located in):
sudo mkdir -p /usr/src/alsa
cd /usr/src/alsa
sudo cp ~/alsa* .
sudo tar xvfj alsa-driver*
sudo tar xvfj alsa-lib*
sudo tar xvfj alsa-utils*

3. Compilation and Installation

Step 4 Look up your sound card in the sound card matrix on the alsa-project site. On the page of your sound card you will find specific information on how to compile alsa for your card. Take note of ./compile –with-cards=<yourmodel> for now. We will use this to configure the alsa driver, the first of three components:
cd alsa-driver*
sudo ./configure --with-cards=<valueyoulookedupearlier> --with-kernel=/usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r) --with-sequencer
sudo make
sudo make install

Pay attention to the last output of each command above. Possible errors are always listed as last. There’s no point in continuing if the above didn’t work. ./configure mostly spits out not satisfied package requirements, which we normally did satisfy in the first point.

When no errors occured continue compiling alsa-lib:
cd ../alsa-lib*
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install
When no errors occurred continue compiling and installing alsa-utils:
cd ../alsa-utils*
sudo make
sudo make install

Step 5 Now go back to the sound card page on the alsa-project website. Somewhere on that page there’s a code section to insert (modprobe) the modules in the kernel somewhat resembling to:
sudo modprobe snd-yourcard ; sudo modprobe snd-pcm-oss ; sudo modprobe snd-mixer-oss ; sudo modprobe snd-seq-oss
Copy and paste that section of the alsa website and paste it into the terminal. Be sure that snd-yourcard matches your sound card.

You should now have sound working for this session. If you don’t have sound, be sure to check that no channels are muted. You can adjust/check your sound channel level with alsamixer from the alsa-utils package:
alsamixerYou can unmute the sound with the m key and raise the volume with the arrow keys.

If you still have no sound, we might correct it with manually specifying the parameters in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base. We are doing this later on, so just continue with this guide.

Step 6 To make sure you have sound when you start up your computer again, we will automatically load the correct modules for your sound card (the ones we inserted in the kernel earlier). Open up /etc/modules
gksudo gedit /etc/modules

To see what you have to put in this file, you will have to go to the sound card page on alsa-project again. There’s a section “setting up modprobe and kmod support”. Copy the code and paste it at the bottem of /etc/modules. The code you have to insert resembles to:
# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-<yourcard>

# module options should go here
<insert the modules we modprobed earlier in here!!!>

# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

# card #1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

Step 7 Reboot your computer. You should have sound by now. If not, don’t worry. We will manually specify the model of your card in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base. This mostly resolves issues with headphone & mic jacks not working. Find out what model of sound card you have:
cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#* | grep Codec

It will return the chipset model of your sound card(s), for example: “Codec: Realtek ALC260″, so your sound card is ALC260. Now browse to the alsa documentation page: “http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/sound/alsa/ALSA-Configuration.txt Search this document for (a part of) your model, for example ALC260. You will find one or more model options resembling to:
hp HP machines
hp-3013 HP machines (3013-variant)
fujitsu Fujitsu S7020
acer Acer TravelMate
basic fixed pin assignment (old default model)
auto auto-config reading BIOS (default)

Pick the one that comes closest to the one you have. Say you have an fujitsu laptop, choose fujutsu. Paste the following at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:
options snd-yourcard model=MODEL

In our example, MODEL is replaced by fujitsu. Now reboot your computer and you should have sound fully functional.

4. Uninstall

You can revert the whole installation process very easily if you still have the /usr/src/alsa folder where we compiled everything. Just type this command in /usr/src/alsa:
cd /usr/src/alsa
sudo make uninstall

5. Troubleshooting

Some cards still might not work after following the steps in this guide. These are very card specific problems and I’m not going to cover them all here. LordRaiden posted a Comprehensive Sound Problem Solutions Guide on the Ubuntu Forums. I suggest you go look into it if you want a complete trouble shooting guide.

Muted channels
Sometimes you just forget that every channel is still muted. Slide the volume up with alsamixer or any other volume manager:
alsamixer

Setting system > preferences > sound
Navigate to system > preferences > sound and explicitly configure it to use PulseAudio or alsa. PulseAudio should normally work as it is a sound server, a background process accepting sound input from one or more sources (processes or capture devices) and redirecting it to one or more sinks, in this case our alsa.

Playing with probe_mask.
A lot of cards suffer from the headphone/mic channel not working. First you have to check if it is enabled. You can do this by right clicking on the sound icon in the notification area, choosing open volume mixer. Choose the switches tab and verify that internal mic is checked. If that is already the case, you could change the options line in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base to look something like this:
options snd-yourcard model=MODEL probe_mask=1
You might want to change the number of probe_mask if it doesn’t work rightaway.

Get help
If you still don’t get sound working, you should check dmseg on messages with snd_ entries. Run through the Comprehensive Sound Problem Solutions Guide, open up a new thread on Ubuntu Forums and post the following information:

• dmesg (or dmesg | grep snd)
• aplay -l
• lspci or lsusb (in case you have a usb sound card)
• your attempts from the problem solutions guide
• other information or attempts

People will try and help you out with your problem.

• Operating System: Ubuntu Linux
• GTK: Default Ubuntu Human Theme
• Window Manager: Emerald Theme Ubuntu Golden
• Wallpaper: Yoritsuki Night
• Compiz Fusion & Conky

Getting the requirement
Before we can compile spim and xspim, we will need some extra packages. The following command will install all the required packages:

sudo apt-get install flex bison byacc libx11-dev libxaw7-dev build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

The latest version of spim can be downloaded here or can be fetched with the following command:

wget http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~larus/SPIM/spim.tar.gz

Installing Spim
tar xvfz spim.tar.gz
cd spim-7.3/spim
make
make install
Installing Xspim
cd ../xspim
xmkmf
make
make install

Now that you installed spim and xspim you can launch it by typing xspim in the console.

Install Apache 2
sudo apt-get install apache2

Install PHP 5
sudo apt-get install php5

Install MySQL 5
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql
sudo apt-get install php5-mysql
I also recommended you to install phpMyAdmin to access your SQL database easily via your web browser:
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

Configuring MySQL
For the default configuration of MySQL you can use this command:
cd /usr
sudo ./bin/mysql_install_db --user=mysql
To access MySQL with the root user type:
sudo mysql -u root
By default, there is no password set for the root user. This is absolutely NOT recommended, so we will set a password for root:
mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('yourpassword');
with yourpassword being the password you want to have (deuh!….)

For normal use it is advised to create a regular user. To create a new user:
mysql> GRANT PRIVILEGE1, PRIVILEGE2 ON *.* TO 'yourusername'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'yourpassword' WITH GRANT OPTION;
with yourusername, yourpassword, privilige1 and privilige2 the user, password and privileges you want.

Configuring Apache
To set your user as the php administrator:
gksudo gedit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
and find the line that starts with “User” and “Group”. Change it to the user and group you work with. Now restart apache:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Let MySQL work with PHP
gksudo gedit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
and remove “;” in front of the line “;extension=mysql.so” and restart apache again:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Now everything is set and should be working. You can access your server by typing http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 in your web browser. The directory for your web files is /var/www or /srv/http depending on your linux distribution.