Thursday, October 22, 2009

Linux Mint Sound and Video Woes

I have a PCI Soundblaster card I use with my machine. When I installed Linux Mint it seems some apps wanted to use the onboard sound while others went for the sound blaster. Seeing how I only have one sound system I needed to consolidate this mess. I went into BIOS and disabled the onboard (the lesser of the two) sound.

Everything worked great but for what ever reason Pigdin would crash when it tried to play any sounds (which was very annoying.. cause you would get the first word of someones message and boom, crashed). This stumped me to the point I almost stopped using pigdin.

It was obvious that ALSA was trying to use my old sound card, but how to I change its configuration?

I later found that if I delete all the hidden ALSA configuration files in my home dir and rebooted that the problem would be resolved( ls ~/.a* ). Rebooted and sound worked... but video was broken.

After more research I found that I updated my kernel trying to get the sound working (through the immense amount of linux sound fixing tutorials on the internet). It seems that my video drivers are connected directly to the Kernel.

NVidia Drivers Not Found; Was the basic error. I tried quite a few different things, but I was confused to the point I had to jump on IRC.

My problem was I was trying to install drivers ontop of drivers. I forget the basic methodolgy of Linux is that you must remove before you can replace (keeps things clean). So a simple sudo envyng -t would provide me option to remove the current drivers, reboot, and install the new drivers.

So if your NVidia drivers die after a kernal update, then just use the envyng tool to replace them.

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