[lug] FC 5 on Laptop

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 03:34:51PM -0400, Gordon Golding wrote:
>Sound card sounded the test tones OK during install but now there is no sound.
>Conexant AC-Link Audion

Sadly, Linux audio itself is just barely usable as it is, without any help
from bad drivers.  The audio on my laptop is broken more often than it's
working.  A huge part of the problem is that there are too many standards
for how to talk to the audio device.  KDE and Gnome each have their own,
plus there are the lower-level interfaces in ALSA and OSS, to name some of
the most prominent.

Now, as long as you have everything configured to use the same interface,
and that interface supports some sort of sharing where multiple processes
can talk to the interface at once, you're probably going to be in pretty
good shape.  However, ef even one application is talking some other
interface, you're likely to run into issues.  Remember that Firefox may
also be wanting to talk audio because of the Flash plugin if you have it
enbled.

I may also be running into problems with the audio drivers after a suspend,
and removing them before a suspend would clear it up, but quite frankly
I've given up.

So, what I've done is to get a little portable ogg player, and I've turned
on visual bell and have just given up on direct audio out on my laptop.

>He found a driver for the Video.  But at the highest resolution, text is very small.  At any lower resolution, it is very fuzzy.
>ATI Mobility Radeon Xpress 200 Series

Increase the font sizes then.  Many applications have the ability to have
their font modified.  For example, I would run Konsole with the font size
turned up so that my 1600x1200 display gave me roughly 80x24, for running
full-screen Nethack.  :-)

However, with Firefox doing that really sucks.  It screws up the sizing of
other elements.  You will want to set the "DisplaySize" setting in the
"Monitor" section.  You'll have to search the web for how to calculate it,
but using that it can adjust things so that, particularly noticable with
firefox, things look better.

Thanks,
Sean
-- 
 moshez is not afraid of commitment.  "Yes, honey, I'm ready for commitment.
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Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability