Fix Keyboard Sound Controls; Ubuntu Hardy on IBM Thinkpad T60

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

I have a ThinkPad T60 (hda-intel sound) and I was noticing that the volume buttons produce very coarse/abrupt volume changes. I guessed that the volume buttons were changing some internal (direct to speaker) volume and, because of key mappings, were simultaneously changing the Master volume found in the software volume control.

So I disabled the key mapping to the two volume controls found in System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts. Now the volume control is much better with the two buttons. It behaves much more like it does in Windows. Pushing the buttons doesn’t change any of the “Software” volume, as I prefer. Unfortunately, it also stops the nice Volume OSD from appearing.

Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-496180.html

Update: A solution can be found later in the thread at http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4807282&postcount=23

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Restore GRUB

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

1. Boot from a Live CD (any Linux distribution, doesn’t matter)
2. Open a terminal window
3. Type “grub”
4. Type “root (hd0,6)”, or whatever your harddisk + boot partition numbers are (pressing tab on the keyboard will auto-complete for you)
5. Type “setup (hd0)”
6. Quit grub by typing “quit”.
7. Reboot.

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Latest Screenshot from my laptop

Posted on March 10, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

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Getting (compiling) the latest version of Beagle Indexing Service on Ubuntu Hardy

Posted on March 7, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

I couldn’t find pre-compiled packages (.deb) for the latest version of Beagle (0.3.9), so I thought about compiling it myself, I did the following:

  1. Downloaded the new source files from http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page (beagle and libbeagle) and extracted the files.
  2. Opened a terminal window and navigated to the “libbeagle” folder first (as beagle depends on it)
  3. Ran “./configure” to tell me if my system has all required files and libraries and I had to install the following libraries via apt-get: librsvg2-dev, libgtk2.0-dev, and libmono-dev.
  4. Ran “make”
  5. Ran “sudo make install”
  6. Did the same for “beagle”
  7. Killed all beagle processes (beagled and beagle-search) and restarted them
  8. I know it’s annoying to find it reindexing all the files, but that was fine for me, I’d leave the laptop on for an hour or two and everything is just fine
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An Ubuntu Resource Treasure: Ubuntu PPA

Posted on March 6, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

Ever tried installing packages that weren’t built for your version of Ubuntu? I’ve tried that HELL lot of times!
The solution was in front of my eyes, but seems I was blind or something :S; It’s Ubuntu PPA (Personal Package Archive): https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ppas. Just search for whatever software you want or a certain update for it and It’s there, just take care that these are PERSONAL, so might not be very stable

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