Walking Randomly

When I bought my Dell XPS M1330 it had Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) installed and I quickly upgraded to Intrepid Ibex (8.10) using the update manager with only minor problems. Well, after today’s release of version 9.04 of Ubuntu, otherwise known as Jaunty Jackalope, I decided to jump on the bandwagaon and upgrade yet again.

It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is to go from one version of Ubuntu to another.  I just typed the following in the terminal and followed the instructions

sudo update-manager -d

A couple of hours or so later and I had a shiny new operating system up and running.  Lot’s of people have written about the new stuff in this latest version of Ubuntu so I won’t repeat any of that but what I will do is report on how the upgrade affected (or otherwise) some of my favourite mathematical programs.

• Mathematica 7.0 seems to have been unaffected and works just fine.
• MATLAB 2009a seems to be just fine too.
• Maple 12.01 is working perfectly.

How very dull!  Nothing to fix at all with these three.

Youtube sound problems

For some reason there is no sound on Youtube videos.  The following fix is touted by some but it didn’t work for me as I already had the package installed

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound

So far I haven’t managed to find a fix for this issue but will update this page if that changes.

Sound is too quiet (FIXED)

The sound output on the M1330 has always been on the quiet side but as of this update it is so quiet that I can barely hear a thing (and before you ask – yes I have checked that the volume is set to maximum.  Hopefully I’ll find a fix for this too.

Update:OK so it turns out that I didn’t have ALL the volume sliders turned up to maximum.  The path to success lay in installing and running gnome-alsamixer.

sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer
gnome-alsamixer

and then ensure that all of the sliders are turned up to maximum.  MUCH better!

I’ll update this page as I find out more info.