Kubuntu 16.04 GUI Audio Controls not working

April 21, 2016April 22, 2016 neanderslobaudio, controller, kde, kmix, kubuntu, pulseaudio, settings, sound, ubuntu, volume3 Comments

I just upgraded to Kubuntu 16.04 beta and ran into a frustrating situation. My audio controls weren’t working; I tried my volume buttons, mute button and the little icon at the bottom (which happened to be highlighted in red).

When I went into Audio Volume Settings, all tabs had their own little version of “No _____ Detected”

So what to do?

After some troubleshooting with the fantastic help of “clivejo” in the #kubuntu freenode channel, it was finally determined that the settings that I carried over from my previous version of Kubuntu were causing the problem. Here’s how I solved it:

Remove directory ~/.config/.pulse/
Remove directory ~/.configh/.kmixrc
Do this for all user accounts that have been carried over (these configurations are user-specific)
If the issue persists, reinstall pulseaudio: sudo apt-get install --reinstall pulseaudio

With these four steps, you should regain control over your life again (or at least your audio).

Update:

You may find that the above temporarily solves the problem but upon the next bootup, it’s the same issue all over again. (That was the case with me.) Apparently there was another file somewhere in ~/.config/ left over from 14.04 that was screwing everything up. (Seemed it clashed with Plasma’s autologin and pulse audio got pinched in the middle.) Anyway, I just removed ~/.config/ entirely and started fresh. If that’s not an option for you, remove each file one by one and see which one’s the culprit. I just didn’t have the patience for that.

Update part 2:

The files that were causing trouble in my ~/.config/ were:

~/.config/akonadi/agentsrc
~/.config/akonadi/akonadiconnectionrc
~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc

Excluding directory from grep

February 14, 2015 neanderslobbash, exclude, grep, linux, notes, terminalLeave a comment

For some reason, I can never remember how to do this.

If you ever want to grep for something but leave out a particular directory, use the --exclude-dir=DIR

So if I wanted to search the current directory for the string img, but don’t want to look in the directories tmp or log.

grep -r --exclude-dir=log --exclude-dir=tmp "img" ./

A summary of linux user management tools

December 24, 2014December 24, 2014 neanderslobbash, linux, userLeave a comment

To add an existing user “frank” to an existing group “ssh”:

usermod -a -G ssh frank

To add new user “mike” to existing group “friends.”
usermod -g friends mike

To show all members in a group “people”:
sudo apt-get install members members people

Boot Error: Gave up waiting for root device

June 10, 2014June 10, 2014 neanderslobboot error, disk, fsck, linux, mount, root, ubuntuLeave a comment

So today my computer threw this really strange error when I was booting it up. Still don’t know what caused it but you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m backing up that hard disk now that I recovered it. While I was booting up I was confronted with the following error:

Gave up waiting for root device

I’d never seen this before and the screen looked like this (though this isn’t my image):

I booted to a live cd and found that my root file system (sda2) wouldn’t mount, nor could it be repaired by gparted. After a lot of trial and error with other solutions, I gave fsck a try (with a little help from here) and it worked like a charm. Below is what I did:

entered sudo fsck /dev/sda2/
This scanned my disk and immediately reported that there were problems. It asked if I wanted to fix them.
I entered y to signify that it should do so
fsck came up with well over 100 block count errors, asking me each time if I wanted to fix it. I kept entering y and finally threw caution to the wind and held the key down until it finished.
I restarted and it worked.

Of course this isn’t guaranteed to fix everyone’s issue but if you’re out of ideas, give it a try. I’m sure glad that I did!

Neanderslob VS Technology

As I stumble through the world of linux, I've decided to log new tricks I learn because I often forget. I decided to share the log because…. eh, why not.

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