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

This problem had been a nuisance for me for a while, In the past, whenever I exited out of a window with lots of tabs, I’d get a nice warning message asking to confirm that I wanted to exit out of all pages.

This was fantastic because, on a qwerty keyboard, Q and W are right next to eachother. So, one slip of the finger turned a command to close a single tab into a command to close the whole darn window. But it seems that new versions of Firefox have disabled this warning by default. Today, with the help of Mardeg from the #firefox channel on irc.mozilla.org, I re-enabled it!

Here’s how:

Navigate to about:config?filter=browser.showQuitWarning in Firefox.
Then you will be confronted with some warning about voiding your warranty (see below) You really needn’t worry about this for the setting we’re changing. The warning applies to all navigations to about:config as some settings in there can indeed be precarious to change. This one is not.
Next you will be faced with the setting itself. Simply double click on it or right click to toggle it as true.
Finally close out of the tab and you’re done! The next time you exit out of firefox with multiple tabs, you will receive a warning.

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.

settings

Kubuntu 16.04 GUI Audio Controls not working

Update:

Update part 2:

Get Firefox to display warning message when exiting multiple tabs