HaLe Communications Blog

ok, since switching to ubuntu on my laptop, i hadn’t been able to get my built in Ricoh webcam to work.

now 2 days ago, i upgraded to Ubuntu Jaunty and wanted to address this issue again. no luck at first site, but not wanting to give up, i started looking around and found the driver that did the trick!

ahixon / r5u87x / overview — bitbucket.org.

people who are using intrepid, should be able to find the answers here:

http://www.arakhne.org/ricoh/

well, it did the trick… meaning, the webcam is found now and i can play with it in “Cheese”… however, when trying to use it in aMsn or Skype, the image it renders is only a small portion of what it should show and it shows “double vision”. Since i suspect that it is not a 3D visualisation mode , i am guessing there is still something off.
Actually, this was to be expected, since the driver r5u87x is still in the process of being fine tuned and bugs are not abnormal in this stage.

I will keep you posted if i should get it working.

I was looking for the way to get my headphones working on my Sony Vaio VGN-FZ29VN with Ubuntu 8.10 and this is what i found (ow yeah don’t forget about sudo when you try this!!):

The Problem : The headphone / earphone jack is being ignored by Ubuntu 8.04 ’Hardy Heron’ on the Sony Vaio VGN-FZ21S. Sound continues to play exclusively through the lap-top speakers whether or not headphones or earphones are plugged in.

The Solution :

Edit the file :

/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

To include this line at the end :

options snd-hda-intel model=vaio

Save the file and reboot your machine.

via Michael Flanagan » Headphone fix for Ubuntu 8.04 on Sony Vaio.

UPDATE FOR UBUNTU 9.10 :
the file is called /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf on Ubuntu Jaunty

I threw out Vista on my laptop today and chose Ubuntu 8.10 as OS. What a great OS it is… The install is easy and clear, even for a noobie like myself . Well, noobie, i have played around with linux before (mainly with Gentoo), but this time, i went for the real 100%. No dual boot. No more Bill.

As i said, the install was easy and everything worked out of the box (as far as i have checked), but typical fears such as wireless network, soundcard, etc… seemed to be no issue at all. Next, connection to our outlook server, no problemo! Evolution is a very very good mail client if you ask me.

And what do you know, i could even see the bluetooth symbol on top of my screen, telling me that i have a working bluetooth device on my laptop. Because Sony does not (yet?) have a PC Suite for Linux, i went on a search for alternatives. After looking around a bit, i chose Gnokii. Mind you, this little program was built for Nokia phones, so no guarantees for other brands.

I could easily connect it via USB, see my contacts and even send sms messages. So far so good. But off course, i don’t want to play around with cables all day long, i want to use the power of bluetooth. Well, that did not work like a charm.

The bluetooth device manager just did not find my phone. At all.

Trial and error and lots of looking around on the web finally brought succes. After performing the command below, i was able to find my phone via the bluetooth manager and pair it to my laptop.

sudo hciconfig hci0 reset

Now just to find a way to sync over bluetooth with Gnokii. This is what i did:

First you will need to edit the config file.

sudo gedit /etc/gnokiirc

Make sure to set these parameters. The config file itself contains a lot of very useful comments. Be sure to go through them.

model = 6300
port = aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
connection = bluetooth
rfcomm_channel = 1

Little hint: to get the mac address of your phone’s bluetooth device type *#2820# in your phone.