How To Fix Audio Fade Out With Headphones In Ibex Ubuntu 8.10

I have a Dell Dimension E521, which I upgraded to Ibex Ubuntu 8.10. I was seeing some strange audio issues. Basically I would loose sound altogether, and sometime I could get it back by performing a:

sudo alsa force-reload

but sometimes that would not even get it, so a reboot was required.

Eventually I realized that plugging in headphones in to the front speaker jack would cause the sound to slowly fade out, and no amount of mixer twiddling would bring it back.

This thread showed me the fix (thanks Psyke83).

Just edit the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file and insert this line at the end:

options snd-hda-intel model=dell-3stack

After a reboot, you should be good to go.

UPDATE:
Well this fixed my headphones causing a fade out. Audio still dies on me from time to time... I guess I will need to continue to work on that.

UPDATE #2:
Still fading on headset sometimes. Right now I'm not very happy with the Ibex "upgrade" the only real improvement I've seen is the side scrolling mouse wheel...

UPDATE #3:
There is a bug report here.

Ubuntu 8.10 Ibex PPTP Non Functional

This is just crap. PPTP vpns do not function correctly under Ibex.

I have not been disillusioned by Ubuntu yet, until now. This worked fine before. To go from something that worked fine, to something that is included with OS but is broken? WTF. LAME.

I will continue to watch and update if I can get it working, or a decent fix is found.

UPDATE:

using this patched network-manager-pptp_0.7~~svn20081015t024626-0ubuntu2~nm2_i386.deb
, and by NOT saving the password for the VPN, I've got the vpn working. hopefully this will become part of the official repos soon.

OMFG - New Ubuntu Out In Two Days!!!

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepit Ibex) is coming out in just 2 days. CAN YOU FEEL THE EXCITEMENT?

Wait...

What?


A new release of Ubuntu normally has me very excited. But this time around I'm just not feeling it. Maybe it is the upcoming election distracting me. Maybe the New Xbox Experience which is about to go live that has my geek attention. Or perhaps the lack of compelling new features is the reason I'm not jazzed. Whatever the reson is, I guess I'm not the only one. While there are some interesting new features, there is nothing in the new release has that "Wow!" factor for me.

I guess that shows how far Ubuntu has come. It pretty much does everything I want and need it to do already. Of course it would be nice if some of those windows only apps (like Netflix watch instantly) worked on Linux, but that is not a Linux issue, that is Netflix issue.

In terms of running the computer and being a platform for the apps I need? It is already there. Now, if you are having hardware support issues, this might be a highly anticiapted release for you. But I have not had any of those issues, so I'm not on the edge of my seat waiting for this release. So while I will be upgrading, unlike on previous releases, I won't be doing it the first chance I get. I can wait a couple of days until the mirrors aren't swamped.

Ubuntu 8.10 Ibex Upgrade "Low Graphics Mode" Nvidia Driver Failure

So, I went against what I had said previously about upgrading right away, and let my home machine upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 yesterday.

First a few thoughts. The upgrade process went pretty smoothly. But there were way too many prompts during the process. And I believe one of these prompts was the root cause of my main issue with this upgrade.

After the upgrade completed, I rebooted. Upon entering the graphical portion of the boot sequence I got an error indicating that the Nvidia driver had failed, and that I was going to be running in "Low Graphics Mode" - or some such thing.

I was then prompted with some options on how I wanted to deal with this issue. I ended up running in low graphics mode, just so I get a usable desktop.

Trying to use the hardware drivers manager to select the different nvidia options continued to fail. Using envyng to try to install the drivers gave me an error that the it could not load the driver given my kernel version, and could not fix the issue. (sorry I cannot recall the specific error).

You see, it turns out that I (must have) inadvertently kept my same menu.lst file - the file that gives you your OS boot options when you start your computer. So my machine did not have the option to boot into the current Linux kernel, only the 8.04 options. The Nvidia drivers could not work in this fashion.

So I was able to edit my menu.lst file to include the current versions at the top of the list:

title       Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=344347ab-37e0-4b42-9362-d11a047da5fe ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic
quiet

title       Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=344347ab-37e0-4b42-9362-d11a047da5fe ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic

You will need to make sure that the partitions (hd0,1) and root=UUID match your own. You should be able to dupe those settings from previous entries in the file. (Thanks to this thread for pointing me in the right direction on that part of this.)

Once I put those options in, and rebooted into the CORRECT version, I was able to load the nvidia drivers, and all was good again.

So, the real problem here is that I opted to keep a previous version of the menu.lst file. Why would I do this? I honestly don't recall that specific prompt, as I said there were a bunch of them. I thought I was taking the "safe" options when prompted during the setup. I did read them at the time, I was not just randomly clicking my way through them. I also think I took the defaults on every one, but I can't be sure on that.

So, this was my fault, because I told the system to do this, BUT shouldn't there have been more feedback as to what this choice would do? I would think that if you required your previous menu.lst file to be used, you would probably already know how to fix or save it yourself. A normal user would probably not need this option, and certainly should not have been given it without more instruction. I would say this prompt was probably not needed at all. I think most of the prompts probably fell into this category.

Even if the number of the prompts cannot be reduced, the timing of when they are given needs to be addressed. During the upgrade, I would be prompted for something, and then the system would start working. I would go away, only to come back a half hour later to find yet another prompt waiting. I estimate that the upgrade process took about one hour longer for me simply because I was not sitting there watching it the whole time. The powers-that-be ought to consider consolidating any prompts that will be required during the upgrade in to one series of questions that are posted before the actual processing occurs. Of course this is a "quality of user experience" issue, not a functionality one, so it is less critical.

Given the issues I had, I think the upgrade process needs work. There should be fewer prompts, or at least they should be consolidated, and when the upgrade does require input, they need to be clearer what the impact of these choices would be. I was able to sniff out the root issue here pretty quickly - although not as quickly as I should have - but for a rank and file regular user? No way.

Bottom line, upgrades on Ubuntu are getting better, but still not ready for prime time. I guess this is an area that the powers-that-be need to work on some more.