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Comment by jawngee | Hacker News Reader

Case in point, right after posting this, my f*cking audio stopped working just like that.

Awesome.

Sounds to me like you're having some personal problems, like maybe your graphics card isn't supported. Spend some time at ubuntuforums.com & see if they can help.

This is a pretty common dell laptop. If we're talking about prime time, and I have to ask on forums for help with something basic like this, then is it really ready for prime time?

I don't hate ubuntu, I just hate when people say it's ready for prime time when it's most certainly not. Ready for netbooks? Sure. But not for a full-on windows laptop replacement. No way.

That doesn't necessarily follow, eg lets assume it's a hardware problem. Have you ever tried installing XP from scratch? After you spend hours hunting for drivers, do you conclude windows isn't ready for the desktop? Or look at all the people having hardware problems on the OSx86 forums. Try buying something from dell if you want to convince yourself about readiness for prime time. I don't particularly care, I've been using it for years & I have no problems with window decorations.

This has always annoyed the crap out of me when using Ubuntu. There is a ton of great info at ubuntuforums.com, but it is not well organized and questions don't always get answered. Sometimes a problem will get considered answered without really being answered. A simple issue shouldn't require going to the forums, which can be considerable time investment. Maybe community efforts could be focused on a wiki for more common issues and reserve the forums for problematic issues among those doing real development work. Then again I could just be too lazy for Linux.

Hmm, I usually find answers to all my simple questions on google. There's so many of them I think you'd also have to google on a wiki.

The wiki is here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community

Personally, I use Google and pick the link that goes to the community wiki, and avoid the forums. Most new users' Ubuntu nightmare situations seem to get started by reading a "this worked for me" sequence of commands on the forums, trying it, causing another chain-reaction of problems, spiralling to a hell of command-line operations and manual software installations that make no sense for the situation, forcing the user to finally reinstall Linux (perhaps another distro) and post angry messages online.

A related problem is that the habits used for casual troubleshooting on Windows -- clicking through menus and dialogs and changing things until the system fixes itself, downloading fixes from a website and installing them -- are generally disastrous on Linux. I suspect this is where most of the land mines on the forums come from.

Searching the wiki documentation is much better than the other two approaches for avoiding these problems.

That's the thing about Ubuntu (or, Linux in general). When a user has a problem like this, it's not supposed to be his/her fault. And yet whenever a user says "This thing isn't working", Ubuntu supporters immediately say "Ubuntu is fine, your stuff isn't right". It shouldn't be the user's fault. Ever.

If a user's system is unsupported, the OS should know this and fail gracefully. Don't blame the user. Especially if Ubuntu is designed for the "every-user", don't tell them to go to some website. To them, it's just broken and they'll gladly switch back to wherever they came from.

Fail into what? If the video card isn't supported, it's not going to fail into anything really usable.

It's funny that that most people would be happier if you tell them something can't be done than if you gave them some obscure bash incantations. I'm hoping the linux community won't come to regret this influx of new users.

Odd comment in the thread about Ubuntu becoming mainstream. Do you want linux mainstream? It's understandable if not, being mainstream means taking on all those really computer illiterate and all their... special questions.

But if people do want linux to be mainstream that means coming over the users, not the other way around. If you want people to use your product you can't go putting them down because they don't "get" your system. They're using the computer to make their lives easier/better, not to gain your approval.

If you are on ubuntu hardy I feel your pain. It completely blows. Perhaps this will help, the result of many many painful hours combing the forums. It seems to do the trick for me, anyway. I programmed this as a bash shortcut so I wouldn't forget.

  I don't really know what the fix is when things crap out, I have just kind of tried things blindly.
  http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-968697.html

  (?) sudo alsa reload
  sudo alsa force-reload
    also: look for a dialog that pops up, possibly in task bar, if it asks if reload is ok, it is. beh.

  also related
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/294859
  also suggested:
    sudo killall pulseaudio
    sudo alsa force-reload

  also:
    rm /var/lib/alsa/asound.state (don't include the rm if googling for this post)
    sudo force alsa-reload
      http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:faaeSQtYS4cJ:pennsylvania.ubuntuforums.com/showthread.php%3Fp%3D6242032+gvfs+alsa&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=pl

Is there a new trick for making these wide comments not screw up the page width? The last trick users suggested stopped working in FF4, apparently. What is the latest?

I think this page has nice technique, although it's a bit different than what your old CSS was going for:

http://users.tkk.fi/tkarvine/pre-wrap-css3-mozilla-opera-ie....

P.S. -- disclosure: I work for Mozilla P.P.S. -- I kinda hate CSS

The "toggle word wrap" FF add-on just sticks this into whatever page you're looking at, I think. Works great.

This is exactly the kind of maintenance issue that makes me occasionally hate using Ubuntu.

Oh look! My flash player suddenly stopped working! I get to do six hours of forum combing and troubleshooting, whoppee!

Yeah. Ubuntu marketing says, We make Linux Easy. And mostly this is true. But here, they opted for using the latest and greatest technology (pulse) rather than old and known to work everywhere (alsa) because of developer pressure, in a supposedly LTS version that huge numbers of people are going to use.

I view this is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, ubuntu screwup.

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