I love MusicBrainz Picard. It keeps my music collection organized, tags and renames them, and heck even fetches the cover art for (almost) all songs. Picard is just brilliant.

And the icing on the cake – its FOSS & cross platform. And it was working fine – till couple of days ago.
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I’ve owned a Sony Ericsson HBH-DS970 for nearly 2 years now, and I use it pretty often with my previous phone ( the Sony Ericsson P1i ), and my current iPhone 3G. I also use it occasionally on my laptop. It has worked fine in Windows XP, Vista & Windows 7. Getting it to work with Linux, however has been an EPIC FAIL. The last time I tried it was probably a year ago, and I just gave up in frustration and continued to use my EP-630 as the earphone.

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Nvidia Proprietary Drivers need nvidia-settings to set screen resolution and change other settings. In previous versions of Ubuntu and in other distros to make them permanent (used in every session) you click the “Save to X configuration file”. From Karmic on there is no xorg.conf by default!

As a result, nvidia-settings is not able to save the settings and every time I logged in I had  to change the resolution (Phew!!!). Then Sathya helped me. He gave me a link from Ubuntu Forums. Then I did the following to fix the problem:

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This is the problem that affected me the most in the history of Linux using so far. Image, for two full years i just dint know the solution to this prob is that easy. Too late of me to find out. any ways, better late than never.

So the problem is with FX 5200 Ubuntu liveCD/installation boot will hang mid-way, as to most users, it fills to first three bars and then fails. But the cause is acpi settings create some problem with Ubuntu booting. Nope, “acpi=off” option in Ubuntu boot options does NOT work. Now, that’s what everybody suggests only to know it never helps. Even Sathya suggested to me.

It doesnt work because, BIOS settings dominate at the boot time. The entry makes no sense. SO now does it become clear? You disable ACPI in BIOS!  Wow, that worked like magic for me. Now am running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on my PC without any boot problems.

However, shutdown does not work properly. Other things like restart and general stuff work fine.

So try that comment on whether it works.

I was catching up on some feeds yesterday, and this piece of news caught my eye -Amarok 2.1 released. Being a long time Amarok fan ( heck Amarok itself was catalyst to make me use my SUSE 10.0 use full) time – I read the article with great interest.

Amarok 2 users would know that Amarok 2 series is a shadow of its old Amarok 1.4(“Amarok Classic” self) – and quite a few people still prefer Amarok classic to Amarok 2 – primararily because of Amarok’s missing support for visualizations, equalizer amongst others. I don’t use equalizers – and as for visualization – well don’t use that either.

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Well I’d just shifted to Fedora couple of days ago, and yesterday I’d applied the latest updates. Later on I thought I’ll explore the system a bit and decided to use the package manager KPackageKit (I’m on KDE). KPackageKit though, was not returning any packages. I thought I might have screwed up KPackgeKit, so I installed the Gnome version of PackageKit. Only then I realized, that something was wrong.

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I was very curious about Intrepid’s release. I just could not wait! I even pre-ordered the CD but downloaded the DVD without patience. I have not-so-fast a connection when it comes to downloading a DVD. In spite of it, I just downloaded. I even allocated HD and swap space for that and was just waiting to install it.

And what horrors!

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Though it’s been a while since Gutsy was released, I couldn’t try out for various reasons. But finally I got my hands on Gutsy DVD edition, and I sat about installing it on my Dell Inspiron. I noticed first signs of trouble when Gutsy was taking unsually long to boot up. Switching to verbose mode, I knew something wrong when I saw

hda_intel: azx_get_response timeout

Initially I thought it was a problem with the live environment, however when install was done, my fears were confirmed. Indeed, Ubuntu wasn’t able to play any sound. This was a bit surprising since openSUSE 10.3 detected all of my hardware flawlessly(even more weirder was that Kubuntu Feisty had no problems with the sound!)

A bit of Googling and I found there are few solutions to this problem, which is because of ALSA. Apparently version lower than 1.0.15 has bugs and problems especially with Intel HDA codecs. So let’s see some solutions:

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When I got my Dell Inspiron, the first thing that I wanted to do was install openSUSE 10.3 on it. After all openSUSE has been serving me well all these years! Because of time restrictions and office workload being too much, I couln’t do it. So when the weekend arrived, I decided to install it!

             Since I dont have an Internet connection, downloading it was out of the question, so I had grabbed a copy of last month’s Digit magazine which had a Bootable openSUSE10.3 version on it. Initially I was weary, especially with the partitioning and the bootloader settings(I’ve done this lots of times, my hesistation was because of Dell MediaDirect occupying the first partition of the HDD. But then I just threw all fear and caution out the door, inserted the DVD and booted up my laptop.

             The green “Welcome” openSUSE splash screen is just awesome and put me in the right mood. After clicking on next couple of times, I ran into trouble. The installer’s partitioning tool informed me saying the NTFS partition could not be resized, as there were inconsistencies in the filesystem and informed me to do a file system check.

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First up, if you haven’t read my previous post, go read it!

Now, after you’ve read the post, you people can get an idea as to how pissed off and frustrated I was. The following day, ie, Tuesday, I was determined to finish off the work come no matter what! So armed with my Cheque book, 2 pens(yeah, 2, just in case any one ran out of ink!). Left my Office at 5.45pm this day, as I’d decided to goto the Adyar branch. First up had to goto ATM as I had absolutely no cash. Thankfully, ICICI ATM is just opposite to the bus stop. After collecting the cash, I was wondering if I’d be as lucky as the previous day(well, in terms of gettings Share autos, you know!) and just as I was thinking about it a share auto comes along, but it was empty! Nevertheless I stop the auto, and tell him him “Adyar-ICICI Bank”.

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