29a.ch - Jonas Wagner's Blog

Yesterday, I messed up my system by trying to install a NVIDIA beta driver in order to use opencl. Today I tried again with more success. Here is how I did it:

1. Download the driver from the NVIDIA website
2. Open the hardware driver manager of Ubuntu (Sytem/Administration/Hardware Drivers)
3. Select the NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (the active one) and click remove
4. Log out
5. Press CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to the console
6. Login with your username and password
7. sudo stop gdm
8. chmod +x ./nvdrivers_*.run
9. sudo ./nvdrivers_*.run
10. sudo init 6
11. Enjoy OpenCL goodness

A WORD OF WARNING don't try this unless you understand all the steps involved and know how to recover your system in case something goes wrong!

Stay tuned for some nice opencl experiment.

It looks like the problem is still there in Ubuntu 9.10, and it looks like the old fix still works. But it looks gorgeous.

PLEASE DO NOT FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS IN THIS POST UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

Pulse audio seems to be a constant source of trouble for me while providing no benefits at all (at least not any noticeable ones). So here's how to get rid of it:

Open /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio in a text editor and comment out everything (put a # in front of every line) and then save it.

This will prevent pulse audio from being started when you log in.

I bought myself a new HP Pavilion dv5 notebook because my old Lenovo broke. It's a bit too shiny for my taste but anyway. Installing the new Ubuntu was a breeze. After installing I noticed that audio playback using the speakers didn't work. Too bad. So here's the solution that worked for me.

Open /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and add the following lines at the end of the file:

alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m4-1
options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1

Reboot and everything should work again (or just reload the snd-hda-intel with the new parameters).

I hope that helps,
Jonas