Fixing sound problem with HP Pavilion dv3 laptop and Ubuntu
12 June 2009

I left work so for the first time in many, many years had to supply myself with my own laptop. I picked the HP Pavilion DV3-1075US 13.3-Inch Laptop (Amazon link -- btw, with the rebate it's about $50 less than what I paid for it at Fry's. Fry's had it for $50 off and then another $50 rebate) because it was really light with a decent (small) sized screen, but not too small.

It comes with Vista. I hate the idea of having paid for a Microsoft operating system, but I was in a rush and couldn't readily find any systems that came with Linux installed that I could get immediately. If I had to do it over again, I'd buy the Dell XPS M1330n (link to Dell Inspiron and XPS laptops that come with Ubuntu installed -- scroll to the bottom for the M1330n) that comes with Ubuntu installed on it. The dimensions are roughly the same as is the price.

I installed Ubuntu on it and the sound was muted. I checked the alsa mixer and unmuted anything that was muted, checked System->Preferences->Sound, checked the volume, etc...followed all the troubleshooting steps I could find. Turns out the fix was a simple one line addition to a conf file. I searched for all sorts of obvious things on Google, then finally searched on "ATI Technologies Inc RS780 Azalia controller", the audio device displayed by executing $ lspci (list all PCI devices) and that took me to No Sound on 9.04 with ATI RS780 Azalia on the kubuntu forum which led me to instructions on fixing my sound issue:

One line edit to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf. Add options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m4-2 enable_msi=1 to the end of the file and reboot. When you reboot, you'll notice the red muted speaker icon will turn white and then you'll know it worked.

20 March 2009

Wow...I don't even know where to start with this one. I haven't touched this site since...well obviously November of 2002. But I plan to start using it again so it'll be frankensteined for a while until I figure out what blogging tools I'll use. For now, the newest entry in a new "debugging" series.

LD_ASSUME_KERNEL

I was trying to update some ancient code from the old MySQL python module (the one written by Joseph Skinner that I can't even find a working link to anymore) to (an older version of) the newer MySQLdb module. My legacy scripts are running in python2.2 and I kept getting an ImportError: ... version GLIBC_2.0 not defined in libc.so.6 with link time reference.

LD_ASSUME_KERNEL is an environment variable that doesn't normally need to be set, but legacy apps can have dependencies on a specific set of libraries for glibc so you have to explicitly set the kernel version. Appropriate values for LD_ASSUME_KERNEL are valid linux kernel versions. In my case, using Python2.2 and MySQLdb-0.9.1 (which is a wrapper around _mysql), I had to set LD_ASSUME_KERNEL to 2.4.1.

Then, because my cgi-scripts are executed by apache, I had to use the SetEnv directive in my apache config as well: SetEnv LD_ASSUME_KERNEL 2.4.1.

Now, if I want to execute those scripts on the command line for testing, I also have to set the env variable, but I only did this temporarily for the xterm I was in or when I ran a script -- setting this in my .bashrc file caused other things to break so don't do that.

Set environmental variable for the term you're in:
$ export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1

Change it just for this script run:
$ env LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 ./my_python_script.py

Couple of docs about LD_ASSUME_KERNEL:

• A guide to Red Hat troubleshooting and debugging
• Explaing LD_ASSUME_KERNEL

What was NEW when I last edited the site:

• 11.08.02 :: Caching content with Apache's mod-rewrite
• 03.22.02 :: The PHP/MySQL Guestbook Tutorial is complete and available now.
• 02.26.02 :: DHTML: Writing cross browser tool tips.
• Upcoming :: Using Flash with PHP, XML, and MySQL. Image map rollovers. XML/XSL. RSS.

I haven't spent much time updating this site except when job hunting. But I'm back in school full time and will start updating with all sorts of misc. code and whatever I'm working on and class notes, etc...

March, 22 2002

Welcome to hardcoder.com. The site has recently been completely redesigned. There wasn't much new content going up here for about two years, but in the last month I've started updating old and adding new content. I hope you find it useful and helpful in your endeavors.

This site is meant for both the novice and experienced web page developer. This is the place where I will be putting helpful content about things I'm currently working on. The Intro is meant for all first time visitors. If you're new to all of this I suggest you start at the beginning, learn the basics and then try some of the more advanced topics. There are several tutorials you can walk through, or you can click through and pick and choose the topics you want to learn more about.