[ale] Fwd: Ubuntu/Gnome problems

[Jim Kinney]

Sean can read but can't post. F11 is being a PIA for him so any ideas?


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sean <kilpatms at speakeasy.net>
Date: Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 9:09 AM
Subject: Ubuntu/Gnome problems
To: jim.kinney at gmail.com



Jim,
Can you forward this to ALE for me. Right now I am stuck in Upgrade HELL trying
to get from FC 7 (which worked well) to FC 11, which is damned near useless as a
desktop. I got Kmail running and then "imported" my previous setup. The import
process nicely broke both sending and receiving mail and there seems to be no
simple way to fix it. So I am forced to use web mail, which limits me to my
Speakeasy address, which isn't the one I use with ALE.

Tnx,

Sean Kilpatrick

---------------------------------------------------------------


Bottom line problem:
Getting Skype to work on one of two machines:

Machine #1: Former FC7 box, now upgraded (what a disaster!) to FC11.
I prefer KDE but KDE 4.2 is FUBAR so I am mostly using Gnome. There is a glitch
in the sound system and when I try to use Skype it reports, "there is a problem
with sound playback." I am using a Logitech camera/microphone that is supported
by Linux and the OS clearly "sees" the combo.
I'm guessing there is some sort of problem in the Alsa config, but I
have no clue
how to fix it.

Even mnore of a headache. When I first fired up this box with FC 11 "Cheese" (a
gnome program for running the camera) worked okay -- at least it could record a
video and show the image on the screen. Now it doesn't and I have no clue why.
Obviously I have to get the camera/microphone working to make Skype work.


Machine #2 Acer Netbook with Ubuntu 9.04 freshly installed.

Same problems. I can't get the built in microphone and camera to work.

Also, what sort of package manager does Ubuntu (Debian?) use. I can do Yum and
rpm and probably most of the others, but I have no clue what to use.

Ubuntu 9.04 comes with an unknown default root password! WTF. There is
no convenient way to install a root password. At one point in the install
routine I was assured that I would get the chance to add other users to the
machine. No such luck. Never happened.
Now I can go to the command line and add user accounts and I can get to a root
shell by interrupting the boot process, but I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO!
There is no excuse for this.

Sean









-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness