Author Archives: Marko

Logitech webcam and "cannot set freq 16000 to ep 0x86" (Ubuntu bug #459445)

12 Replies

Some Logitech web-cams have serious problems all of the last kernel revisions (somewhere since 2.6.26 kernel revision). Sometimes when user starts its Linux OS things with web-cam go bad. Symptoms are "Waiting for sound system to respond" when clicking at the sound icon in system tray and ton of "cannot set freq 16000 to ep 0x86" in your /var/log/kern.log. What solves this problem when this occurs is removing snd-usb-audio kernel module from kernel and plugging it back. Cause of this bug is still unknown, and some say it is a bug in some Logitech webcam firmwares which gets triggered by something in Linux boot process. Lets work around it on Debian, Ubuntu and its derivatives...

Continue reading →

Compiz NVIDIA and ATI games auto switch off/on scripts

8 Replies

Nvidia LogoLast week I've stumbled upon this article with the title "The Cost Of Running Compiz" that bashes Compiz Fusion for killing Linux gamers (is this oxymoron or what?) frame rates. Doctor is in the house. Read on...

It would be ideal that you can have Compiz with ton of eye candy and glitch free 3D games. We know that doesn't work. But instead wouldn't it be possible to have our eye candy Compiz disabled while gaming and re enabled when returned to desktop? Sure. Peace of cake. Here's the idea and the steps to do so...

Continue reading →

BASH Script: Google Earth Linux installation with Fix for ugly fonts

18 Replies

All Linux operating systems with Google Earth 6: I'm very sad to see that this fonts fix doesn't work with Google Earth 6. If you find some other Google Earth ugly fonts workaround please write here so we could once again look at Google Earth with nice smooth fonts. Thanks in advance.

These are the instructions for script attached to this post. It'll download Google Earth from Google servers (if it hasn't been already installed) and tie it to the systems QT files.

Default Google Earth installation flaws

  • Your distributions QT files are generally newer than those provided by Google Earth
  • Google Earth fonts doesn't fit in quite well in standard Gnome and KDE interfaces because Google Earth's QT files are not tweaked to your distribution looks.
  • You have no control over Google Earth's GUI fonts properties. You can't tweak fonts using your distribution's tools like "qtconfig-qt4" because mentioned program have influence only over your distributions QT libraries.

By using this script to install Google Earth you can lead Google Earth to forget its old QT libraries and to use your distributions QT libraries.

Continue reading →

Apache, MySQL, PHP server on Windows

Leave a reply

Apache LogoBeing a web master has its good sides, that's for sure. Messing with slow and unreliable FTP servers all the time isn't one of them. On the other side if you violate your hosters "holy" TOS (Terms of service) you will witness ultra fast shut down of your web page and in some cases wipe of your entire SQL database. What would you say about having testing server of your own? Wouldn't it be nice to test your PHP page locally on your Windows PC during construction and "FTP" it to the server of your choice once it's finished? Sure it would! You don't need Ph.D. in computer science to tune Apache, MySQL and PHP just the way you like it, or maybe even smarter to configure your local testing server the way your web page hosters server is configured. If you're interested, follow me...

Continue reading →

Linux and Wacom tablets

1 Reply

From my experience I've learned that every configuration has one or more "Linux unfriendly" hardware. Not so long ago Wacom tablets were one of those stubborn pieces of an equipment. It's true that Wacom driver existed but it wasn't included in your favorite distribution. You had to go to The Linux Wacom Project web page, and download unofficial Wacom driver in its source version. Then you had to spend a few days compiling, crunching through online documents and trough your distributions configuration files adding lines in hope that somehow it'll work.

In the recent years things began to look better for our tablets. Now almost every Linux distribution has a Wacom driver included. It may not be the newest version, but Wacom driver is very mature and in 90% of cases works just fine. So now with a driver included in your distribution you're just a few mouse clicks (keyboard clicks to be precise) away from working tablet in your Linux distribution. I will take the Ubuntu as an example...

Continue reading →