PAM USB & Polkit-1

Tried all kinds of tweaks, but in the end all it needed was this bit in the <services>…</services> section of /etc/pamusb.conf:

<service id="polkit-1">
	<option name="enable">true</option>
</service>

I only had “polkit” there prior to this, and polkit-1 is subtly but significantly different.

(Radeon) HDMI audio in Precise (pre alpha)

I’ve my computer connected to my speaker-equipped monitor through a DVI-HDMI cable. Audio through DVI is a hack, but it used to work until I upgraded from Lucid to Precise; afterwards there was no sound from the monitor. This is a regression introduced in Oneiric, due to the reverse engineered Radeon code causing issues in some setups. Thus upstream have figured it best to play safe and disable Radeon audio by default.

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to re-enable: add radeon.audio=1 to your GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and run sudo update-grub.

Obviously, you’ll then run the risk of encountering the aforementioned issues.

Edit: Briefly after enabling, the HDMI audio again stopped working.

Edit 2: It’s actually flash audio that’s not working through HDMI as other audio is.

Edit 3: The flash problem was due to having an old flash package installed instead of one from the (Oneiric) partner repo.

Hiding username (“Me Menu”) indicator applet in Precise (pre alpha)

There’s no actual Me Menu anymore, but there’s a similar menu bound to your username, and it is integrated within indicator-session. There’s a configuration key that allows for the user switching portion of indicator-session to be hidden. Indicator-session uses dconf for storing its configuration, so you’ll need the tools to tweak dconf:

$ sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

Start dconf-editor and untick /apps/indicator-session/user-show-menu. Log out, login.