Akom's Tech Ruminations

Various tech outbursts - code and solutions to practical problems

Linux Fixing freezing and no sound youtube and flash on ubuntu

Posted by Admin • Monday, September 28. 2009 • Category: Linux

Problem:


I've had this issue for many months but obviously I don't use flash enough to really figure it out. The first few youtube videos would play, but with no sound. If you seek back and forth, or play sound from another player (eg audacious), you may get skipping sound for a little while. Eventually the whole player stops advancing, though you can still seek.

Solution:


<

ul>

  • You may have installed a dozen version of flash by now. As long as they are all ubuntu packages, you can leave them all installed (or you can remove them all)
  • Install the official release from adobe: Adobe Flash, current version is 10. Pick .deb format for the download.
  • Now run sudo update-alternatives --all
    ... This will ask you for all alternatives there are for your system, but among them there will be 5-10 flash-related questions for each browser (including text browsers, apparently). Pick the newly installed adobe-flashplugin like so: 

      There are 2 alternatives which provide `mozilla-flashplugin'.

  Selection    Alternative
-----------------------------------------------
*+        1    /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so
          2    /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so
Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 2

  • Bounce Firefox and you should be all set

    • <

    ul>


    Software Mixing

    Once I got this fixed up, I now had reliable flash playback with one little problem... There was still no sound half the time - if another audio application grabbed my sound card before firefox (eg rhythmbox). Took me a while to figure out what to search for (usually the biggest issue, right?). Apparently the issue is twofold:

    1. My onboard sound card either doesn't do hardware mixing, or the drivers don't support that
    2. Alsa should have figured that out, and turned on Software Mixing, but for some reason it doesn't do that in Ubuntu

    Once I understood this, I used This page to help me out. Grabbed their ~/.asoundrc, restarted all the audio apps, and all seem to be sharing the sound card peacefully now.

    Code and Hacks Locked myself out of pfSense

    Posted by Admin • Saturday, September 26. 2009 • Category: Code and Hacks

    I was experimenting a bit with pfSense 1.2.3rc1 as a replacement for a WRT54G router today.


    So I set did the following, among many things:

    1. Switched web configurator to SSL (443)
    2. Turned on reflection (applies NAT port forwarding rules to local LAN)
    3. Set up NAT port forwarding, which includes port 443 to one of my servers (which isn't up at the moment)



    Guess what? Can't access webconfigurator.... an hour of being very confused later... I get it. All my SSL requests for webconfigurator are now being sent to the nonexistent internal NAT-ed server! I can't get back in, and reboots don't help!

    Fixing this is not too hard. Log in (SSH or console) and edit /conf/config.xml

    <webgui>
    <protocol>https</protocol>


    Now just change to http. (If you're not running off hard drive, you may need to save directly to your floppy.) Obviously changing this will prevent you from using reflection from a NAT-ed server on port 80 now :-)



    NOTE: you may need to "rm /tmp/config.cache" to clear out config cache, and restart web configurator from the menu.

    Reviews The Valor ITS-301D DVD/CD/MP3/MP4/etc car head unit

    Posted by Admin • Tuesday, September 8. 2009 • Category: Reviews

    I recently bought a truck to replace the conversion van as a tow vehicle, and decided not to move the Innovatek head unit from the van to save myself some hassle. This gave me an opportunity to try out a new device as I was somewhat frustrated with the Innovatek (see review). I was looking for basically the same exact thing, but one that worked, well, better. Oh and of course having a TV tuner is no longer of any value.



    I can spoil the suspense by saying that the Valor ITS-301D proved to be an improvement and I have only positive things to say about it. Some details:

    Continue reading "The Valor ITS-301D DVD/CD/MP3/MP4/etc car head unit"

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