Took me a while to find the report, so I’m taking over the terms in the title to point people to Bug #751265: pulseaudio distorts VLC audio.

The dconf key /apps/indicators/sound/blacklisted-media-players /com/canonical/indicator/sound/blacklisted-media-players is a list of players you don’t want listed in the indicator-sound popup. So entering the values [‘banshee’, ‘rhythmbox’] there will hide both said players.

Edit: The key has moved.

Got a very satisfying hardware upgrade done last night: I’d bought a used 3,0 GHz Pentium 4 processor and 2 GB of RAM, and they went smoothly into the old Shuttle XPC SS56GV3.

I haven’t been much into online auctions, mostly because old hardware just tends to pile up at my place anyway, despite that I usually have little actual use for it. The Shuttle’s different though. It’s at my secondary place of residence and I use it as a real desktop almost as much as my main desktop, and so being limited to a Celeron with just 1 GB of RAM was starting to get on my nerves.

The upgrade gave a nice performace boost at a relatively low cost (45 euros incl. shipping), but also left me with a hunger for more good deals. I guess I’m beginning to see why people are drawn to these sites and trade stuff semi-professionally even. And as I’m left with the old bits of hardware redundant from this upgrade, I’m tempted to try and sell them myself.

For now I’m just mostly into the “get adequate stuff for cheap” side though. I even signed up for Ebay and made another small purchase there. Be interesting to see how that goes.

I’m the sole (super)user of my system which is physically secure from untrusted users. I want to skip entering my password for administration purposes. For sudo I’ve achieved this with a file saying

jani ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

in my /etc/sudoers.d/.

For Policy Kit, according to pklocalauthority documentation, I’ve placed inside /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d a key file I’ve named “90-net.mummila.jani.nopasswd.pkla”. Here’s the content of that file:

[We don't need no stinkin' passwords]
Identity=unix-user:jani
Action=*
ResultAny=no
ResultInactive=no
ResultActive=yes

What this translates to is that when I’m logged in and on an active local session (sitting right here), I’m not required to enter my password for administration tasks.

Peruin maanantaina syyskuussa tekemäni kiintolevyn tilauksen. Sitä ei näkynyt eikä kuulunut eikä ole mitään tietoa koska kuuluisikaan.

Harkitsin hetkisen kooltaan kaksinkertaisen mallin tilaamista, mutta se maksaisikin sitten kaksin verroin, enkä minä todellisuudessa niin isoa järjestelmälevyä usko tarvitsevani, että se kannattaisi. Sitä paitsi kun tämä SSD-päivitys kerta näin paljon lykkääntyi, olisi jo järkevintä ostaa suoraan SATA 3.0 -levy. Emolevypäivitys on sekin kohta tuloillaan, ja siinä jäisivät nuo nopeat portit tyhjän pantiksi, jos SSD tukisi vain SATA 2.0:aa.

Ivy Bridgen tuloa odottelen yhä. Näillä tietämin se ilmestyy ensi vuoden toisella kvarttaalilla, eli suomeksi sanottuna joskus maaliskuun jälkeen.

Vanhassa koneessa piisaa vielä potkua mutta tämä strateginen odottelu tuntuu silti tuskastuttavalta. Mieluitenhan sitä päivittelisi konetta tasaisesti pienissä paloissa. Mutta ainut todellinen, isompi harmituksen aihe on se, etten hankkinut toista kahden teran levyä ennen kuin niiden hinnat räjähtivät käsiin. Terasetin mukaan pula saattaa jatkua vuodenkin.

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.

The details of why are covered by quack quixote over at Super User, but the short of it is a privileges issue, prefix chvt with sudo and it should work.

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.

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.

$ gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 -t string 'Scroll_Lock'
$ gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 -t string 'gnome-screensaver-command -l'