Tag Archives: debian

Restarting the Linux sound subsystem

Leave a reply

Sometimes my laptop gets to a state in which sound works through the built-in speakers, but not through the headphone jack. Possibly my solution is too brutal, but it works -  restarting the whole sound subsystem. I guess that it may come handy in other situation: the ability to restart a subsystem instead of rebooting the machine, is always an advantage.

The rationale is simply reloading the kernel module that acts as a driver to our sound hardware. Reloading isn't easy, as:

  1. Kernel modules use this module.
  2. User processes use this module.

Continue reading →

Network-Manager 0.9.2 WiFi password issues

2 Replies

I've noticed a few significant issues with Network Manager on GNOME 3.2, when connecting to WiFi networks that require password (e.g. WPA, EAP). Trying to find existing bug reports, I've found quite a mess: multiple bug reports, both downstream (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora) and upstream (GNOME bugzilla).

I suspect many of these bugs are related to the same root cause (or max. 2-3 root causes). In order to try and make sense of this, I tried to categorize the bugs I've found. I hope it'll help to gather more info to resolve the bugs, and reject dups.

  1. NM (gnome applet?) forgets passwords:
    1. GNOME Bugzilla: [666465], [665431], [665503]
    2. Debian BTS: [651445], [646018]
    3. Ubuntu BTS: [904666]
    4. Mint forum post with a workaround
  2. NM takes too long to re-connect after resume (possibly problem in popping up the enter-password dialog box):
    1. GNOME: [664289],
    2. Debian: [651358], [653076]
  3. NM-gnome double password dialog box case:
    1. GNOME: [661208], [665503] - mentioned in 1st comment,
    2. Debian: [651097]

I'll try to update this post when new info arrives, please add your comments.

Generally speaking, I think that FOSS community lacks some "dirty-work" QA workforce for bug scrubbing, such as what I'm trying to do here. I don't even know how to name this non-coding activity. Thoughts? 🙂

Update1: This Linux Mint forum post suggests that only the applet "forgets" passwords.