Hardy Heron + Sound
May 5th 2008 12:07 am
I think I blogged earlier about the Dell Inspiron laptop I bought with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. I managed to use it sparingly underway (had I known beforehand how little free time I would have I wouldn’t have bothered but that’s a different story). It was cool showing some of the other officers the programs where I’m listed in the credits though.
Anyways, one of the first things I did when I got back of course was to make sure it was fully updated. And wouldn’t you know it, they had just released Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), and would I like to upgrade it asked me. Well I’m a sucker for upgrades so I went ahead and clicked OK.
It actually went 99% smoothly. The 1% this time was that my sound no longer worked afterwards, which was unfortunate. Luckily a little searching around revealed a post on Ubuntu Forums from someone with a different laptop but an identical problem. It appears that the pre-loaded Dell driver for the modem replaces the audio driver so that when the kernel was upgraded but the driver wasn’t, sound broke. Uninstalling the Conexant HSF Modem driver (hsfmodem in Adept Package Manager) reinstalled the correct driver and things were fine. I didn’t even have to reboot.
If the Dell-added weirdness hadn’t been added this probably would have been a seamless upgrade. The differences appear strictly cosmetic at this point however. I know PulseAudio is now floating around in here somewhere but ALSA still works so that’s fine.
iPod headphones seem nicer now for some reason. Maybe it’s just louder now. Then again the sun seems to shine more brightly now that I’m not underway as well. :)