Where exactly is the location of source codes for alsa sound control?
 

Using 14.04 upgraded by internet from 13.10 on a new build of parts.
MSI Z97 Guard Pro /I5 processor /8 gig ram / 500 gig Sata HD / LG BH16NS40 Blu-Ray/DVD WRITER Sata cdrom. New speakers from logitec stereo and sub woofer.

I used the CDROM to load the system so it worked. But at first I had problems with the DVD not playing DVD (The Green Mile). With Google search and help from this website, I got the DVD playing by adding LIBDVDCSS and restricted files. The sound was terrible. The sound goes on and off like a machine gun, and it is full of static. Also later I realized that the system sounds (pop for example) repeats about 10 times when any thing ask for a sound like volume change while watching the movie. I am thinking that the analog and the digital streams are fighting for the output instead of blending together in the mixer. The system sounds are doing the same. So the result is that it cuts off the sound when it gets signal from one of the other sources. any thing would help to sort this out.

All the while working on these problems I have tried to download the source files for these programs. CDROM Driver, LIBDVDCSS,LIBDVDREAD4, LIBDVDNAV, ALSA sound controller and mixer. each time I tried I did receive the request but not the source code. I reinstalled everything several times trying to get the source. I have the package for ALSA now but it trys to install if I click on it. I do not know how to unpack it to see if the source is there. I have checked the /src directory for files but it is empty.

Many years ago I did use Linux for a while. It was REDHAT7 then and the source was delivered during the install. I was a member of the Houston HUG then. That was a very helpful group. However I gave up when I moved out of the area where there was no user group to help. I recently gave up on windoz and started using Linux again. There are no user groups in my area that I have found. It would be nice to find one in the Fort Smith Arkansas area.

You need to check your /etc/apt/sources.list file to make sure that the lines starting with;
are enabled (not commented out). If you have not edited it they should be fine but it is Ubuntu and I have not looked at it for some time so please check.

You can then get the source package for any package through apt-get. Should end up in your <user name> directory.

You need "dpkg-dev" installed.

I think, but am not sure, if you use "--download-only" that the dpkg-dev is not required.

Command should look something like;
I am using Debian so there could be differences. Check the man page for apt-get to be sure.

Thank you for the info. I found the dpak installed already. I found the correct use for the source command on the man page. I found the correct file names on the software site more info on the ALSAmixergui app. I was able to find the alsa-driver file and download it. Ubuntu says it is on top of Debian so if it works there it should work here too. This bit of success makes me feel good about my learning curve. now to open it The read begins.

You should be able to get source code packages from the Ubuntu repos. They usually have all packages that Debian does.

Mixing Debian and Ubuntu repos is not a good idea although with compiling this should not be a big problem. Using .deb files is another ball of wax though.

Ubuntu doesn't put all files in the same places in the file system as Debian does. They make some changes for some reason and this means that the install script in the .deb from Debian will place packages where Debian thinks they should be and this may well not be where the Ubuntu install script would put them. The applications will not work when this happens.

Therefore mixing any packages, even source packages, is a bad idea because you shouldn't get in the habbit of doing this sort of mixing.

The best place to get good information on Ubuntu package management, besides the Ubuntu documentation, is from;
http://ubuntuguide.org

They have pages for all supported Ubuntu versions. If you are not using Ubuntu but another family member (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc) it will not be any differnet because they all use the same repos.

Source packages are not generally delivered by most distros anymore automatically. They are easy to get and have to be by the terms of the licenses they are released under but the number of packages installed has gone up a lot. This means that the default installs would become too large for people that are, say, dual booting with Windows in some, if not many, cases.

If you are wanting to install binary packages from a different repo they will most likely be from some RPM based system. The package "alien" as offered by your distro will convert the .rpm to a .deb with an install script that works for for your distro. Works pretty well although you may need to get some depends in the same manner.

If you decide to switch back to a RPM based system alien is still available and will do the conversion from .deb to .rpm. I have never used it much and always from rpm to deb. I am sure it works just as well the other way though.

This is rarely needed anymore. Most base distros have about everything available and it is simply best practice, security wise, to use packages from the native repos.

Thanks again. I bought a new printer yesterday and have it finally installed and printing at least the test page. The man page does not give a clear command as to print a file in terminal mode. I tried a few variations that failed and reread the mail-cap program but to no avail. Maybe I will start over to see if I missed the command. for example I want to print a file called main.cpp which I wrote trying out GCC. I tried to just use print file and lp file and cp to lp but no print yet.

I am using all ubuntu files that i know of. I have managed to edit the source.lists twice and it still works so I am not doing to bad. I had to do that to get the printer driver code to download. I used the linux printer list pages to help there. The only difficulty there was to get the configure box to find the usb port instead of the lp/ld port.

Oh I forgot is there a command in the apt-get to get a directory listing of files? If there is I did not understand it.

hope to get to try to read the src code tonight time available.

Not real sure what list of packages you want.

You can get just about any variety of package lists using apt-cache. Try the man page on it. From that man page;

For that matter try "man apt". Doesn't have much to say but lists some related man pages.

The man page for apt-cache should keep you entertained for a long time by itself though.

If you get into using testing or unstable you will find apt-mark to be handy too.

Synaptic package manager (gui) is a graphic front end for apt-get mainly but also uses apt-cache and apt-mark. Not to discourage your cli usage but it does come in handy for just looking at what is available at times. Like when bored.

Of coarse you can't have it open when using any apt commands in a terminal. Better to just open other tabs in the terminal and use them for checking things out.

If just doing research most commands can be run as user ($) except, of coarse, ones that actually install or remove or hold or what not.

Aptitude is another great tool. Ubuntu decided to remove it from the default install years ago. Can't have all those tools confusing the idiot users. While depreciated (was recommended version upgrade tool up to the release of Debian 6) and replaced as the Debian recommended tool by apt-get, it still has some very handy functions and better depends resolution tools (rarely ever needed anymore) than apt-get. It is still in the Ubuntu repos I am sure.

Had to mention that just because of the hostility of Canonical toward users that actually want to run their own box as they see fit.

You will find that most of us ex Ubuntu users do hold a grudge. Not against people using Ubuntu, just against Canonical and all their works. Or as well put by another member here on LQ, Butnuts and Comical.

Being a grumpy geezer I am good at holding a grudge.

That said I really hope you have fun with Ubuntu.

Wow that is some batch of files. I played with the commands for a while and am impressed with the amount. I was looking for source codes to study and learn about the GCC system. 20 years ago when I first played with Linux I used RedHat7 and Mandrake for Distros. We had to do a lot of conf files and fixing errors on an installs. We did a lot of copy and paste from other files to get what we wanted without tremendous typing of the same data over and over. I spent about about 6 months going to the meetings and helping do installs for newbys. It was fun then and there were others who knew what to do when it did not go right. I have missed having a user group available to visit.

I installed snaptic also. I see your point about the difference in Distros. I have done some reading on Debian and I like there philosophy so I have ordered their CD and Source disks. So I think I will be doing the reload project again soon.

Also I wanted to comment on the Linux Printing List page. I used it to install the printer and it worked well. I selected the printer and model number and went to the page where they had the printer drivers for the various cpus. One click and it downloaded. Another click and it installed. Wow! The only problem was in the system recoginzing that the printer was there but not asigning the usb connection for the printer. I fussed with it a bit and rebooted the system and that worked. I think it needed to do a reset to identify the hardware again. I would bet there is a command for that. The printer page showed the printer but not USB for the connection. It was showing lp/ld.

I, unfortunately, did not get into using Linux until fairly recently.

Ubuntu claims to be "user friendly" but Mandrake was really the first there and I think, for people that want to avoid cli use, that family of distros, now Mandriva and Mageia, are still the best for that. The Mandrake Control Center (well, Mandriva or Mageia Control Center now) is still the system configuration gui tool to beat.

Ubuntu has its points but it has a very strange attitude towards its users and the general Linux community.

The kernel is the pretty much the same in all distros, give or take a version number, most packages are available across all distros. Main difference is eye candy and package management. I don't encourage distro hopping because of that. By the time you get a package management system well learned you can handle most other things and learning a new package management system is pretty easy then too. They all do the same things. Language is different.

I am actually pretty good with the Mandrake derived urpmi commands. Need to do more checking in my cheat sheets for that though.

I think you will find that GNU/Linux is a mature, modern system pretty much what ever distro you use. Other operating systems, particularly Windows seem to be going backwards. The strong emphasis on package security makes keeping a system clean so much easier then getting .exe files willy nilly from unknown sites on the web just seems like a wreck waiting to happen.

I don't mean to get down on Windows or MS. If not for their fine efforts in producing Vista I would probably be still using their products so I feel a vast amount of gratitude for them. Wife and I don't allow devices running any of those products in our house now. Just too frustrating and dangerous for us.

My Dreaded Mother in Law (pushing 80 pretty hard) is switching to Debian 7. I am the cause of her biggest problem with the switch. I insist on typing the user name in at log in. She has had a couple problems with that. Last time it happened she got it straight on her own though. Had her using FF and TB under Windows anyway so using Iceweasel and Icedove is no shock to her. Xfce is easy to set up to look pretty much like Windows as she is used to so there doesn't seem to be a problem.

Been dual booted for some time, about 3 years, mainly because I put it on there for when Win JerryLewis Pro kicked the bucket. Has had some problems with web sites recently that have not been a problem under Debian so she is ready to switch. I figure I can delete the Win install sometime in Sept.

Is easier for us young people. I am only in my 60s so it is a piece of cake.

People, even those that use Linux as their production OS, seem to think that Linux is harder to use. This is the 21st century. Linux is a 21st century project. It can be more difficult to learn if you want to get under the hood. But it is possible to do that where it is not with other OS's (except a few even less used than GNU/Linux). So it is actually easier to learn to use than Windows if you are just getting into using a computer.

This crap about something being "intuitive" just that. Crap. Or if you are a KDE user Krap. If you are not used to computers at all no OS is intuitive.

GNU/Linux documentation is better than the rest. Has to be good. I can understand it.

Installing is the hardest thing to learn. But you can go to the fine folks at Zareason and get a very fine box preinstalled with anything you want. And a number of other reliable folks too. Better support, gasp, than you get at WalMart.

One thing I never did under Windows, and few people do, is have fun. I have fun with Linux.

Now that you have Synaptic, according to Ubuntu a tool only for experts, you should, before switching to a more real Linux distro, give Software Center a whack.

I did run it when it was in Ubuntu-testing, was part of the job as a tester. Didn't have to like it. Always removed it in any stable installs.

You will find Ubuntu quite restrictive if you attempt to do any major customization. The package "ubuntu-minimal" is a critical part of all Canonical releases, even server editions (why does a server need a boot splash function?). This is a hardwired dependency for the entire system. Very hard to break out of. Limits what you can do drastically. Is a major factor in many respins switching to Debian as their base now.

You may feel more at home with Slackware, by the way. You may want to take a peek at it.

In 2006 and 7 I was doing some contracting for new construction of power plants. I was and Instrument Tech then. It was out of town and one of the fellows there was also a Linux guy but he did live cds all the time and he gave me about 10 to play with. Slack Noppix and Puppy were some that worked ok on my laptop. I just did not have the energy to learn it then as we were doing 7 12's plus some over time. A 30 min drive both ways did not leave me much play time. Eat, sleep, laundry, email and drive. At work we worked as long as there was something to do. By the time work eased up as the job would wind down the crew would leave leaving two of us to do start up and acceptance proving to sell the jobs.

Anyway I knew about Debian but had not used it. A couple of people in the past really liked Debian and another one really liked Ubuntu so I had decided when I went back I would use one of those two. Anoother says once you Slack you wont go back. I got a Ubuntu disk from the Linux Ubuntu mag at books a million store so I used that one to get started. Ubuntu is an expensive mag and I would not have gotten it but I wanted the cd. No other was available that day. I installed it on my system and was so mad at Windoz I did not even make space to save it. Now I can not restore it cause the new mother board will not answer the call in the beginning of the install for XP. It does setup and gets ready to copy and then fails to find the SATA CDROM to copy files. Stalled just sits waiting. I will make space for a second system when I do the Deb install. I think maybe you can copy the entire Cd to the Hard drive and run it from the Hard drive to install the system.

I think there are ways to use Google Earth in Linux but there was no Linux download on their page. I use that to follow my brother the sailor where ever he goes. Currently he in Malaysia I think. He was in PhuKet when I went to Linux. There was something else that was win only that i used. Other wise I don't need BILL. I use a program called MCONVERT but there is a CONVERT ALL in Linux that does the job a bit differently, but it does work better in some instances.

Oh on anther front a question. Can you use one of the office programs to do programming and save your work in a text only mode so you do not have to use some hard thing like VI for an editor. I really hate that program. I still remember that plainly. Used to have to use it to change conf files. I did use GEDIT to look at some files while troubleshooting the CDROM problems and it was not too bad.

I have used grub to boot a number of ISOs. Works well with Ubuntu.

Have never had any luck with the Debian Live ISO.

I install, now, with a usb stick. Easy to do that with the dd command. You need a blank stick. Works with live and non live images equally well.
if = input file
of = output file

Input file is path to your ISO. Output file is the stick designation like "/dev/sdz".

I have a lot of drives and partitions so some paths are long but here is one I kept in my cheat sheet.
Being a grumpy geezer with a typing problem I cheat on paths. An example of an entry in the cheat sheet;
Try to avoid 3rd party packages. They are not protected as the native repos for your distro are and they are not signed, the package manager is not able to check the hash or signature.

In the Debian repo is googleearth-package. Try that before compiling. Ubuntu should have a similar package, check in Synaptic.

For the syntax, indent requirments and so forth a text editor is really the way to go. I am not a code writer but the simple scripts that I edit work very well done on a simple text editor like gedit, mousepad, kate and so on. If you prefer emacs it is in the repo as are numerous others. Run a search in Synaptic for "text editor" or;
Should keep you busy for a while.

Thats a lota text editors. Definitely more to choose from now. They will take a while to check out.

I don't quite understand how to do an install with a USB stick if you still have to use the iso for the data stream. Does the USB just contain the install program sequence? Without knowledge I had assumed that you just make up a small kernel with minimal extra programs. Must be wrong again.

Do you keep your hints in a file that you can copy and paste from?

The install ISO that you choose to use is a complete install of a system. Just like a Live CD/DVD is a live session and will install pretty much what you can try out in the Live Session.

Debian has not used Live Media officially until Wheezy, current stable, but there has been a Debian Live project for a good while and the guys there have put out Live CD/DVDs for a while now unofficially. They still, by the way, put out an unofficial Live ISO that includes the non-free components.

When you use a stick to install you are doing the exact same thing with the stick as you would an optical disk. You are copying the ISO to the media and then booting it. You do need an image that will work on a stick but all Debian images are "hybrid" and work fine either way.

The main difference is the speed with which they boot and the speed of the system once booted. From a stick it is nearly as fast as an installed system. Boots almost instantly.

I think if I were you I would get the official regular install disk for Debian if that is what you want to use. They offer it with different DEs as the default install on different images. The ones that just say Debian will be using Gnome for Wheezy (stable) and Xfce for Jessie (testing).

There is also a netinstall image. Very small. 222MB. Basically installs a kernel, boot loader, package management and networking (no wifi, just wire connections). You can boot to the tty prompt and finish from there with what ever you want to have.

Most people that want to use testing or sid as a production OS use the stable netinstall and upgrade it to testing and then to Sid if need be. Doing it that way avoids using the testing installer which may have problems of its own.

I assume you have an ISO for Ubuntu unless you deleted it. If you still have it you should try out the dd command and see how it works. Will boot a lot faster than your optical disk. Is also a great way to have a "persistent" Live Session handy. Just dd and then set up the persistence partition following the instructions for your distro. Ubuntu and Debian are similar but not the same so you have to get the instructions for the one you are playing with. Is handy for having something you can keep up to date, save configurations, use anywhere you go (32 bit image is best for that as it boots to both 32 and 64 computers) and install packages on that remain installed after a reboot.

Handy for recovery work just like Live CD/DVDs have been used for years but you can have a big enough stick so that you have storage space for recovered files.

You can build a system from scratch. There is even a distro just for that with an instruction book instead of an install image. Linux From Scratch.

The rest all have install images that install the binaries for a working system. For the most part having to build that way is a thing from the last century (way back then).

My cheat sheets are not real useful to other people. They are written for me. Leave out a lot of things that you need because I either know them or have them in a different file.

Man pages and experimentation are your best bet. I am a big believer in multi booting. I keep an install that I do not mess with until I know something works. I have at least one other install that is the official victim and gets a lot of experimentation done on it as long as it survives. And in doing so my cheat sheets become more chaotic, fuller and improved. This allows me to have victims that last longer and get broken in new and interesting ways.

I can claim some real tallent for breaking systems. Getting better at fixing them too.

Tend to leave myself messages on ones that I don't want to break, usually in the sources.list. Like "This is Stoned Lizard the co-main use OS. Don't screw it up!". That is in my Stoned Lizard install of Jessie. Supposedly my main OS backed up by a Sid install, Lounge Lizard. Use Lounge Lizard more though recently.

Ok I did some checking. The Ubuntu ISO is a 10 digit number for the size of file. I think that might be 10 Gig or so. I suspect the Debian file will be about the same size. The biggest USB stick I have is 16 Gig. Is that enough to do the job? Do you need other files besides the ISO on the stick. If so I will try to make a bootable USB and give it a try. I hope the DEBIAN DVD's show up pretty soon as I am getting anxious to try the new install. Maybe it will be a live CD also. It would be nice to have one boot up quickly. I have had to wait for ever to get booted up for so long, I really would like a faster booting system. This one Ubuntu does about a 1 minute boot up. Oh do you boot up on the stick all the time after the install is done? Windows had to reboot all the time but this one has nearly a week of uptime so far.

I have not had the time to do much checking into this as I have been busy on other things that are getting behind. I still have not even moved all the fallen trees on my place yet. and some are in the way. I have built a sewing room for my wife and it is almost finished.


As to the cheats, I was NOT going to ask if I could have yours, I was going to ask about doing it for my self so I would not have to dig through the whole manual all the time. It takes me so much time to find what I want. Besides my cheats would probably be different than yours. I am familiar with the ^C & ^V for copy and paste. I just learned that clicking the center mouse button will paste the top clip board entry at the cursor. Really COOL to me. I think Klipper is a really cool program. In windows I used the crappy editor for my own cheat sheets. I think it was word. I saved the files I made in RTF text format so there would be no formatting in the documents. I have started using Gedit because it is what the intro used.

Another question. While going though the intro I have, I learned about the directory files and types, sometimes I can not get a command to work. I do a list and see a file is a directory and try to do a cd /to it and I get back a message that it is not a directory. why does that happen? If I try to run it like a program it says it is a directory not a file. Example I am in my /Home/Don and do an ls -l to get the listing and it says that one of the listings is /Templates. When I try to cd /Templates it says it is not a directory. This is confusing to me and frustrating. This is not the only place this happens to me.

I have been reading up on the scanner program Xsane and it talks about front ends and back ends. The text is not clear to me what the front and back ends for these programs are.

I have a USB Printer Epson Work Force 2540 that is an all in one unit and it would be nice to have it scan also. I downloaded the Xsane program and it added Skanlite for the scanner. When you start the program it checks for scanner devices, but says it cannot find any. It will not do any thing else that I can see.

While reading the Sane website it talks about lots of things that need to be in the kernel and in the config files but I am not able to find them. I think maybe there is 7 different setups that might work. I know that I need would be part of the USB type files but cant find the place to download the info they talk about. It makes me feel dumb.

I am not sure what you are looking at for the size of the Ubuntu ISO. Did you look at a md5sum (security hash)?

Went to the Ubuntu site and their download for 14.04.1 is 981MB. Had to wade through a donation page to get that information, haven't been to their site for a couple of years. Don't think I will be back. But a 2 gig stick is big enough for any ISO install media I have ever seen.

Debian Stable install CD1 (all you need for an install the others are simply a current snapshot of the repos with all the other packages on them - easier to simply install them with apt-get on line if you have an internet connection) is all of 648MB for the Xfce image.

The DVD image for Debian testing is 3.6GB so you would need a 4G stick. Cd1 is 647MB, so about the same as for Debian Stable.

Once installed any distro will boot from the install.

If you put a Live image on a stick, with Ubuntu or Debian and I am pretty sure with most RH branch distros, you can boot in a "persistent" mode. This requires another partition on your stick that needs a particular label and, in the case of Debian a small file with a particular name and contents in that partition. This will allow your user configuration files to be saved and any files you create and any packages you install to be kept in that partition and be used when you boot to the stick. This is handy for portablility of an OS that you can take with you and use on any computer that has the right architecture for the OS.

It is all some people use, particularly some Windows users as they don't need to ever do a real install.
That is what I do for my cheat sheets. I keep several different text documents with different sorts of information. Installation, where the dd command was stored is one. One for apt, one for dpkg, one for gimp, etc. Keep them all in a Debian directory in my data partition.
You need to give the entire path to the directory. /Templates is not a directory. /home/don/Templates is a directory.
note the ~ as in ~$ and ~/Templates. ~ is an abrieviation for /home/<user name> which is your default directory when working in cli. So;
will get you to any directory in your users /home directory. This will get you back to default;
from any other directory you may have been working in.

Was going to say that most people don't work in their user sub directories much but then thought better of it. I have one directory (/home/tom/Mogrify) that I put image files in for manipulating resolution for batches of images, both size and pixels per inch (-resize and -resample commands -- check your "man mogrify" page if you have imagemagick installed). I work from that directory when doing that sort of thing. Safer so that I don't misdirect the command to the directory that has the original images in it.

Hope that was of some help. If not I hope it, at least, confused you. Confusion is the foundation for learning.

I would recommend the Debian Administrators Handbook. You can find it on the web or wait for your install to be complete and install the package "debian-handbook".