Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

I just installed Ubuntu 8.04.2 on an ASUS K8U-X.  All went well — it even handled my SATA drive after some monkeying around.

However, the sound didn’t work.  My board has the M5455 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device.  I think it needs the ALI-1888 driver. I finally solved the problem with help from post #9 here. This part of the solution worked for me.

Edit the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf file by commenting out this line:

#options snd-intel8x0m index=-2

And adding this line:

options snd-intel8x0 buggy_semaphore=1

Reboot. It works.

Well — it’s working so far. 🙂 ~Steve

I have a problem.

I have a DD-WRT router that’s served me for years — and continues to serve me well.  It connects to four PCs wirelessly and one or two wired.  All the computers that connect through this router can surf the web except the one in the secretary’s office.  Two weeks ago that computer suddenly could not surf the web or mail servers.

The secretary’s computer can connect to the router.  When you give it the router page, it can load the router setup page in firefox.  It can even connect to google if you tell it to go to google’s IP instead of google’s domain name.  But it cannot connect if you give it any domain name.  Obviously it’s not picking up the DNS info.

The Internet Protocol properties (TCP/IP) are set to obtain the IP address automatically.  I have changed them to a static IP with the gateway and DNS server set appropriately as follows:

IP set to 192.168.1.98
Subnet Mask set to 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway set to 192.168.2.1 (the router)
Preferred DNS set to 192.168.2.1

(I originally typed this wrong.)

I know the above setting is correct because my office PC has a static address and it works with that setting.

But the secretary’s computer consistently cannot pick up the DNS from the server.  All other computers on the network (wired or wireless, static IP or assigned) use the DNS without any problem.

I have tried turning off the firewall (Norton) and making sure Windows firewall is disabled.  It still didn’t work.

Someone told me to replace the card.  I pulled the wireless card out and used the network port on the motherboard.  Same result.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Recently, I’ve noted that while searching for things that I KNOW are online, Google fails to return any results. How do I know they are online?  Because they are on my personal blog at blog.shieldsgroup.com.

Since I am curious, I searched for them on Yahoo!  Instead of showing me one page of about ten results, Yahoo! showed me two pages of about 20.  While Google failed to list results from this blog, Yahoo! listed them all, plus others.

I am not sure why Google failed.  It lists results from more current posts on this blog.  Maybe Google assumed that if someone blogged something in the past searchers don’t need to find it (?)

In any case, I’ve made Yahoo! my default search — again.

Yahoo!