I’ve been absolutely delighted with Xubuntu 12.04 – fast, clean and nicely designed.  However, suddenly I have sound issues – probably caused by an update.

It looks like Pulseaudio is not compatible with the standard sound setup in XFCE and needs to be removed.  After various things I ended up completely reintstalling the sound system with

# apt-get purge linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils

# apt-get install linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils

# apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

NB – It’s very important to re-install the xubuntu-desktop – you may need to install gdm as well if you set up XFCE from an initial Ubuntu install and not from Xubuntu.

Then rebooted.

So we’ve now got Xubuntu back to its default settings – but this has also re-installed pulseaudio (if you has removed it).

Then I removed pulaseaudio with

# apt-get –purge remove pulseaudio

Then rebooted, went into mixer settings and unmuted speakers and headphones.  And sound is working fine – including my media buttons.

Use this procedure with caution – it’s been a bit tricky to get this far and there may be other steps which are needed.

One further point – watch out when installing a KDE app such as kgpg.  This will pull in tons of KDE stuff including pulseaudio (again!).  When I did that I had to go through this whole procedure again to get sound working again.

http://ynottech.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/ubuntu-1110-setting-up-cpu-temperature.html

When running the ‘sensors-detect’ command I selected all defaults apart from allowing the command to edit the configuration file.

It looks like coretemp-isa-0000 is where the CPU temperatures are shown.  I can only get the status bar to show one temperature at a time – but this is sufficient for me to keep an eye on the temperature.

On Ubuntu some of us may have used sshmenu to be able to access servers quickly – but this is not available under the Unity interface. Here’s what I’ve found as a replacement:

http://www.gulecha.org/2011/07/29/sshplus-a-sshmenu-compatible-appindicator/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1138990/git-equivalent-of-svn-status-u

There is an excellent explanation of git principles at:

http://longair.net/blog/2009/04/16/git-fetch-and-merge/

Basically – what I do is:

git fetch

This will pull down any new commits which have been uploaded by others to the repository and point my local pointer

origin/branchname

to that commit.

Then I can call:

git diff branchname origin/branchname

which shows a diff between my current version of a branch and the current version of that branch from the repository.

When I want to merge in the changes from upstream to my local copy I make sure I’m on (i.e. have checked out) the branchname branch and call:

git merge origin/branchname

which merges in the the current remote repository version (which has been brought down by ‘git fetch’ to my local remote tracking branch origin/branchname)) – into the currently checked out branch called ‘mybranch’.

Git can be conceptually difficult – but this may explain things…

Local branches are local – fair enough.  ’Remote’ branches (origin/branchname etc) are your local copies of any code which is in the repository.  They can be behind your local branch (which is normal is you’ve updated code locally) or ahead of your local branch version (if you’ve used git fetch to pull down remote versions).

‘git fetch’ works primarily on remote branches.

Certain git commands – like ‘git pull’, ‘git checkout –track -b refactored origin/refactored’ work on local and remote branches at the same time and may tie them together.

HTH!

When running a git diff command I was getting horrible escape characters everywhere.  Turns out this is because my terminal was in colour mode – (set up by the server admin) – and this was causing the escape characters.

Simply ran the git diff command with the –no-color option to get the output back to a nice normal diff output.

When using the Drush it is possible to run various commands for Drupal from the command line.  This is a brilliant way of being able to script admin tasks etc for Drupal.

However, since the command line is used it is not obvious how to set which Drupal user the commands are run as.  This is important as only certain users can carry out certain functions such as delete nodes etc.

So – we see the command line option –user=1 to set the user to run as – and under ‘drush status’ it shows that the admin user is being used.

I’d built my own module and no matter what I tried the command I was running would not delete a node – it was as if the user being set was being ignored.  Then I found the reason – Drush bootstrap level.

When setting up a Drush command the Drush bootstrap level is set.  I’d set mine to  DRUSH_BOOTSTRAP_DRUPAL_FULL as this seemed to be what I initially wanted – however, I should have set it (or left it) to the default level of DRUSH_BOOTSTRAP_DRUPAL_LOGIN.

The –user option is then honoured!

You may need to create the ~/.emacs.d/plugins/drupal-mode-el/ directory to put the drupal-mode.el file into.  And on Debian/Ubuntu you will probably have to install the w3m-el package – but after that you have a Drupal specific php-mode called drupal-mode.

This fixes the issue whereby arrays in php-mode are not indented in the same way that Drupal Coding Standards specify.

I shut the server down – pulled the drive out and pushed it back in again – and powered back up.  The drive is now showing the 1 second green flash to show that it is being rebuilt.  Hopefully, the drive should be OK as the server is brand new and it was my forced reboot which caused the error.

As a side note – just how do you reset the NIC on a Debian server after a config change these says.  It used to be an easy:

# /etc/init.d/networking restart

but that doesn’t seem to work any more.  Maybe I should be using this new ‘ip’ command somehow?

You have a remote repository and push some code updates to it from a local repository – you then switch to a different local repository and pull down the updated code from the remote repository with:

$ git pull origin mybranch

which updates your local mybranch nicely.

Now when you run

$ git status

it says everything is up-to-date – but you get the horrible ’Your branch is ahead of ‘origin/master’ by x commits’ message – WTF!

What this is saying is that your local branch – mybranch – is ahead of your local copy of the remote – origin/mybranch.

See – your local copy of origin/mybranch (in this case origin/6.x-1.x) still points to the previous commit.

The thing is – I was being too clever and trying to avoid pulling and updating master.  What I should have run was:

$ git pull origin

This will fetch and merge the current branch from the remote to my local branch- and also update my local tracking branch – origin/mybranch – to point to the latest commit.

If you run

$ git pull origin

after running

$ git pull origin mybranch

it seems to be safe and to sort out the issue of ’Your branch is ahead of ‘origin/master’ by x commits’.

Hopefully this quick note might help someone who found themselves in the same position as me.

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