Digital Breadcrumbs

Yesterday I uninstalled the new compiled ALSA driver but I did not succeeded. So I uninstalled them. Suddenly my OpenOffice stopped working. I thought that this was maybe in conjunction with the installation of the Gnome Desktop. This morning I started my openSuse again and suddenly my Firefox isn’t working.

/usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries:
lib asound.so.2:cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Looks like Firefox is using the shared asound library. That’s what I removed yesterday. My decision was now to update the ALSA stuff again with Yast to the latest version from the openSuse repository (download.opensuse.org). The ALSA revision in the repository is

1.0.15.hg20071218-1.1

I updated all ALSA components to the latest revision. After that the sound was still not working and there was an error during configuration with Yast. So I switched to the command-line and invoked

alsaconfig

After that I jumped back to Yast. It was time to pump up the volume and it was working! This was music to my ears.

Sorry for this quite fuzzy description. But hopefully it might help some of you to get the sound running on your Acer Aspire 4720 notebook.

Finally I found some information about my sound problem and a solution as well. Yesterday I tried to install the 1.0.15 version from the openSuse update repository. The system was not very happy with this decision so I stepped back to the old 1.0.14 driver.

Today I found a new how to solve this problem on the openSuse website. Sadly it didn’t worked for my Acer Aspire 4720 but at least all three alsa source packages have a uninstall feature in there make scripts:

make uninstall

So I’m back on square one. Next thing is to update the kernel to the most recent version. But I’ll leave this task for tomorrow and start to work.

Some might hate the way iTunes 7.x stores the downloaded artwork, and some like it. There were already big discussions which is the right way to do it. Personally I prefer to store the images directly in my MP3 files as ID3 tag. There is a trick to manually embed all the images in the MP3 files, but actually I’m not so bored that I’ll update all my MP3 files by hand. What I need is a automatic script for this tedious task.Fortunately a simple NASA rocket scientist has written a handy script suite for this and many other tasks - and it’s running under Windows. If you are an Apple user you can use Doug’s script for the same task.