Hey! I did something stupid in Linux, and now I need your help fixing it.

[Renzatic]

I come to you now, hanging my head in shame, because I can't troubleshoot Linux nearly as well as I can OSX and Windows. Also because what I did was really, really dumb.

So here's the deal. I have my PS3 routed through my sound cards line-in port to route it through my nice computer speakers. It used to work fine, but recently I started noticing a good bit of lag between the action onscreen and the accompanying sound. So I did what any good Linux pro would do, I jumped on Google and searched for an answer to my question.

...and then I did the worst thing a Linux noob could do: I listened to the posted advice of an overly opinionated, high strung neckbeard on some random forum. End result, I ended up uninstall Pulse Audio to install ALSA, realized that ALSA didn't work for my line-in for reasons unknown, tried reinstalling Pulse, and now? Now I don't have sound. Some way, some how, I've broke my entire sound subsystem. I don't even have my little speaker volume doohickey on my taskbar, which is the most tragic thing of all.

I've searched through Synaptics, and it looks like I have the proper libraries installed (both Pulse and ALSA are checkmarked at least), but something isn't firing. I'm missing some step, and I don't know what.

FYI I'm using ElementaryOS, which is based on Ubuntu 12.04. It's got basically the same underpinnings as it, so just about anything that works in Ubuntu will work here. So my question is, how can I reinstall Pulse and Alsa to factory defaults without reinstalling the entire OS? I've been working on this for a day and a half now, and I'm coming up empty. I could use some help.

And yes, I should've known better. This is a total lapse in judgement on my part.

 

[Quackers]

In synaptic try a search for all the installed elements of Alsa and Pulse then select all the unwanted elements for complete uninstall and select all the wanted elements for re-installation. The items for re-installation should pick up any needed dependencies which you may currently be missing.

Obviously you should research which are need and which are not first.

Apply the changes and reboot. See if that helps.

 

[Renzatic]

Don't ask me how this happened, but it seems to be that after all that shuffling around, the only thing I ended up not being able to reenable was the sound indicator on my header bar. All this time I thought it wasn't popping up due to errors in my sound subsystem, but...nope. It wasn't popping up because it wasn't there. Once I got it up again, I found out that...for reasons entirely unknown to me...a goodly bunch of my input and output channels had became muted. I turned them back up, and now I have sound again.

Yeah. I think I need to learn the ins and outs of Linux a better more before I start goofing around in its guts.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Quackers]

Lol, that can happen. I played with sound a couple of years ago and when it returned everything was muted as standard.
In OSes like Ubuntu for example you can remove something and it will take something vital with it (it will tell you it's going to do that but if you don't know what is and isn't important you may take the wrong risk).
For instance it's possible to remove evolution which will take your desktop with it!
Take care and ask first before removing anything would be my advice.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

Yeah. I think I need to learn the ins and outs of Linux a better more before I start goofing around in its guts.

Nah...accidentally breaking something and then fixing it again is by far the best way to learn in Linux. As a pretty much fulltime Linux user since 1996, expect this to happen again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again...

In future just try and be more selective of your sources of information and try and get at least a second source to confirm the original one to lessen the chance that you've found some bunk advice.

Thanks for the help.

What help? by the looks of this thread you fixed it all by yourself

 

[Renzatic]

Nah...accidentally breaking something and then fixing it again is by far the best way to learn in Linux. As a pretty much fulltime Linux user since 1996, expect this to happen again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again...

These days, I don't think Linux requires as much hands-on effort as it used to. I first started dabbling with it back in 2009, and even in that short amount of time between then and now, it's improved by leaps and bounds as far as user friendliness is concerned. It still requires a little bit of technical know-how, but it's not nearly as obtuse an experience for a new user as it used to be.

So I'll probably be learning the core level ins and outs of Linux a lot slower than you did back in the day. But I am learning. And if I mess something up and get stuck, I can always ask more dumb questions here.

In future just try and be more selective of your sources of information and try and get at least a second source to confirm the original one to lessen the chance that you've found some bunk advice.

Yeah, that was totally my fault. Normally I am pretty careful about this stuff, but I got impatient, and wanted to watch Netflix on my PS3 right then and there, and ended up rushing ahead and doing something I shouldn't have. Oh well. I always learn my lessons the hard way.

Oh, and I even fixed my line-in lag issues. All I had to do was install Gnome-Alsamixer, set it to route through that instead of Pulse, and now? Lag free, always on sound from my PS3. I went through all that trouble for something that ended up being so simple and easy to fix.

What help? by the looks of this thread you fixed it all by yourself

Eh. He and another guy I was talking to about this on another forum both led me in the right direction. They deserve some props for giving me a helping hand.

edit: Though I should add that I'm still not 100% clear on the relationship between ALSA and Pulse on Ubuntu. It looks to me that it's two sound backends that are somehow working in tandem with each other. Like I can turn something off in one, and enable it in the other, and...I...er...I don't understand why it's set up that way. I know ALSA is better with some things, but it seems a little overly complicated to me.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

So I'll probably be learning the core level ins and outs of Linux a lot slower than you did back in the day. But I am learning. And if I mess something up and get stuck, I can always ask more dumb questions here.

If you have an interest in actively learning it (rather than reactively), I would recommend that on your Linux desktop machine, you install and configure KVM and then setup a GUI-less VM of something like Debian, Arch or FreeBSD. Maybe then install LAMP, recompile the kernel, setup SAMBA and any other things which tickle your fancy - you'll learn a lot and the best thing is that most of that knowledge will be transferable to OS X as well, given their similarities "under the hood".

Though I should add that I'm still not 100% clear on the relationship between ALSA and Pulse on Ubuntu. It looks to me that it's two sound backends that are somehow working in tandem with each other. Like I can turn something off in one, and enable it in the other, and...I...er...I don't understand why it's set up that way. I know ALSA is better with some things, but it seems a little overly complicated to me.

Back in my day ( ) there was only OSS, which provided fairly rudimentary drivers for a limited subset of sound cards (most notably soundblaster variants) and some basic utilities to manage mixing. The ALSA project broadened the available drivers considerably and introduced more sophisticated sound management utilities. ALSA never really did that good a job of playing sound from multiple sources concurrently and a sound server (pulseaudio) was developed to interface with ALSA/OSS, manage sound scheduling and provide more advanced features. Because ALSA is more low level (and interfaces directly with the soundcard, it has lower latency.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=179458

Edit: This explains it pretty well:

General audio infrastructures

Before JACK and PulseAudio, sound on free systems were managed by multi-purpose integrated audio solutions. These solutions do not fully cover the mixing and sound streaming process, but they are still used by JACK and PulseAudio to send the final audio stream to the sound card.

ALSA provides a software mixer called dmix, which was developed prior to PulseAudio. This is available on almost all Linux distributions and is a simpler PCM audio mixing solution. It does not provide the advanced features (such as timer-based scheduling, and network audio) of PulseAudio. On the other hand, ALSA offers, when combined with corresponding sound cards and software, low latencies.

OSS. This was the original sound system used in Linux and other Unices, but was deprecated after the 2.5 Linux kernel.[15] Proprietary development was continued by 4Front Technologies, who in July 2007 released sources for OSS under CDDL for OpenSolaris and GPL for Linux.[16] The modern implementation, Open Sound System v4, provides software mixing, resampling, and changing of the volume on a per-application basis; in contrast to PulseAudio, these features are implemented within the kernel.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio#Other_sound_servers

 

[Renzatic]

This is less about fixing a dumb mistake on my part, and more a dumb question about something sorta generalized.

I've recently finished scootching my entire /home folder over to its own partition. Originally, I used this drive as my Windows C, D, and Swap drive, with Windows obviously being on C, and my games and files I didn't want to have deleted in case of a catastrophic OS failure over on D. When I installed Elementary, I backed up Windows to my spare, wiped my entire C drive, redid my swap, but kept D as it was.

Now that I've converted everything into a more Linux-centric setup, I've found myself with a ton of space on one partition I'll likely never use...

As you can see here...

I want to get that space back, basically shrinking my OS partition down to around 20-25GB, moving the swap over to the left, and expanding my /home partition. My question is, is there a way I can do this semi-safely without backing everything up to my external HDDs, wiping the entire OS, rebuilding all my tables from scratch, and copying everything back over?

I could go ahead and start shrinking, expanding, and moving everything through GParted, but I don't know how risky that'd be to attempt.

 

[Quackers]

It might be easier to delete both the swap partition (sda5) and its extended partition (sda2) then reduce the size of sda1, increase the size of sda4, as required then re-create the extended partition and the swap partition.

This would need to be done offline. It cannot be done while the system is running.

One major caveat is that deleting the swap partition then re-creating it would give it a new UUID number and therefore your Linux OS may need to be re-educated to recognise that new UUID.
For example if your Linux OS is Ubuntu you would need to edit /etc/fstab to change the UUID of the swap partition to the new one. IIRC you would also need to run sudo update-grub afterwards too.

 

[Quackers]

I think there's an easier way.
If you shrink sda1 then extend sda2 to the left so that it butts up to sda1 then move sda5 (swap) to the left, that should keep the same UUID so no editing would be required.
You could then just shrink sda2 down to the left just enough to encompass sda5 then extend sda4.

 

[Renzatic]

I think there's an easier way.
If you shrink sda1 then extend sda2 to the left so that it butts up to sda1 then move sda5 (swap) to the left, that should keep the same UUID so no editing would be required.
You could then just shrink sda2 down to the left just enough to encompass sda5 then extend sda4.

That did it, thanks! I had to jump off to my thumbdrive and do it all from there, but besides the long wait as it resorted everything, it went off like a charm.Though now I have another question in what's seeming to become a long series of them.

I recently grabbed the Shadowrun Returns beta off of Steam. I already played with it on Windows, so I knew what to expect. I tested out the game itself, and it seemed to run perfectly. No hiccups, bad framerate, or anything like that. What I really wanted to do, though, was get back into the editor. I go to the content menu, click the launch editor button, and...nothing. Not a thing.

Now it could be a bug, which is to be expected, considering this is a beta and all. But to test it out, I decided to launch the executable from the terminal. I cd to it, type ./ShadowrunEditor, and...it gives me an error. Says I'm missing a library. That's an easy enough thing to fix. I hope on Google, do a package search, find it, and apt-get it...and...

...it says I've already got the most up to date version. I've never had this happen before, so I've pretty much hit a brick wall.

I've tried looking for official help on an official forum, but I can't dig up any more info. I've also tried searching for the specific error, but all the solutions are aimed towards other distros, and talk about simlinks and whatnot, which is still a bit beyond me at the moment. This seems like it'd be an easy enough fix, but I'm stumped as to what to do. Is there something I'm missing?

edit: Got it. I had to install the 32-bit library, aka libqtgui4:i386. It now works perfectly.

 

[Quackers]

Excellent! Glad you've got things sorted out

 

[Renzatic]

Yup. After all that time, all I had to do was add a colon and i386 after it to get it to install. It being a 32-bit library didn't even cross my mind.

Also, I'm gonna go ahead and preemptively thank you, cuz I know I'm gonna have some more dumb questions coming up here soon.

 

[Quackers]

Also, I'm gonna go ahead and preemptively thank you, cuz I know I'm gonna have some more dumb questions coming up here soon.

No problem