PC World - a different story every time you phone ..

1) buy laptop

2) delete windows

3) 9 months later, keyboard gGooes ffffaullltttyyyy.....

4) laptop gets picked up, 1 week later, i phone, it returns unfixed.

5) decide i wont fix it, because its still under warranty, though its only a hour long job. on a good day.

6) laptop gets picked up again, a week passes, phoned, they cant find it, returns unfixed, day after.

7) hospital, (nothing to do with PC World)

8) I'm back home, keyboard still needs hospital though, and so the laptop gets picked up, 1 week glides by, i phone, try next week.

9) I phoned Tech Guys (OK,stop laughing) & was told its going to be written off. phone next week, of course. do you see a pattern emerging ?

10) phoned next week, told it WAS written off, expect voucher in post, asked for written confirmation, told no. smelled a rat.

11) waited for vouchers (week) got 12 month guarantee reminder came though.

12) phoned, asked where vouchers were, told 'we don't do vouchers' i slammed the phone down this time.

13) rang trading standards sought legal advice. took advice.

14) got angrier, composed letter to manager of store. 12 month warranty ran out. letter said i could continue quality care, they wanted £7 a month.

15) phoned, told it was waiting to be assessed for write off, try next week.


16) got angrier

17) phoned, told it had new motherboard, cpu, fan, keyboard & case ordered. phone cut off. got angry again.

18) phoned 1 hour later, told its not written off, bring to it into store, said 'i cant, you have it' spoke to manager,
he told me, quote ref number, ask for him in person, when laptop returns.

19) wished i hadn't quit smoking

20) day after, laptop returns, working beautifully, thoroughly inspect & soak-test, lovely. remove Windows.

20) phoned store before i actually go for replacement, to confirm this is not a total waste of time. speak to manager, different manager.

22) was told 'cant replace it' as previous (?) manager thought it was only weeks old. got angrier.

23) found out it was a total waste of time.

24) forgot all about PC World. decide to keep my fixed, as new, nice, laptop.

25) played radio for days, went for walks in the park, Curry, Beer..

26) yesterday morning rudely awoken by pleasant woman phoning from Curry's saying it was OK to take my laptop in and get a new replacement

27) went back to sleep.

More PulseAudio and Skype stuff

So, here we are a few months after Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS appeared,
the new OS - Kubuntu 10.04 LTS - (LTS means Long term support) will be
supported for the next year or two with updates and fixes. good.
of course Pulseaudio is in the Ubuntu (Gnome) distro,
but not Kubuntu. I Understand that Skype is proprietry, and hope they would
fix thhe bugs a little quicker,Ubuntu are going as quick as they can i guess.

Question is Ubuntu, Why dont you include the (almost always needed) padevchooser?
come to that, why doesn't every distro ? ok. so i dislike GNOME, i mean its not
the early 90's is it ? so i use the splendid KDE Desktop Environment. and
Pulseaudio is'nt a included component of KDE usually, mostly just in Gnome distro's.

So I was looking forward to seeing Skype working nicely on Kubuntu 10.04..
No. After tweaking, restarting, recompiling ALSA and my Realtek ALC 272
audio system all over again, there was still breakage.

I Know the Kubuntu dev team are busy, but it seems more and more that
the bigger and busier Ubuntu get, the less and less inclined they are listen
to single voices. An example was, as i am a launchpad member, basically told to
create a PPA to fix the OS then ignored, after being insulted and pulled-up for
my formatting of a bug report, you know, length of lines, paragraphs etc etc.
my eyesight is very poor, expect no help from me or bug reports from now on Launchpad.

I believe the problem is with Skype itself, but i hope the upstream devs may take
notice my bug reports and to help fix this audio issue, by including Pulse
(and Padevchooser) or explain why NOT. unless of course i'm the only one having this problem,

Everyone who wants to use Kubuntu should get a working Skype without pissing around,
something like firstly deciding to Google for the problem,
then find my little post, understand what i'm saying and then add the PPA... that,
or just installing the OS and the app, and expecting it to actually work.
or - maybe i'm just getting old and grumpy.or maybe i missed someting in the
last 12 years of using Linux and free software.
So .. still so many more people are using pulseaudio, so i relented and did a

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio then
sudo apt-get install padevchooser

and tried Sykye again... of course the audio devices, (after a reboot)
were all set to pulseaudio. ok. as i went round and set all my audio apps
outputs to pulse. had to then use padevchooser to set the mic vol up about 3/4
then i tried Skype, and after a crackly reply and a bit less mic gain, a working
Skype test call was received !!! then a day later, a Skype update came down.
i was sure this would break it again, it didn't. crumbs. so thats the secret ?
install and use pulseauduio system-wide on the distro which ships without it,
because the one app (Skype) needs it.

So, if you use KDE 4 and Pulseaudio is NOT installed as an option in
the Phonon config.. do as above and you should be good.

So why, now 10.04 LTS is here, why dont they dont install padevchooser on Ubuntu
or pulseaudio in KUBUNTU. i dont care for pulseaudio still, but seeing as
most Linux's are using it, either install it fully, or not at all. dammit,
i just want working audio...

PulseAudio Fail

2009 / 2010 - Linux Audio Fail

Are Ubuntu going to use Pulseaudio in the LTS / next version ?
I hope not. i think Pulseaudio is harming desktop Linux.


For years i've been happy with audio on Linux.
even since 1998 when i first built the drivers for my winmodem
( remember those? ) - the audio worked, yes, even on Redhat Linux 5.0, maybe it was lucky having the right 'out of the box -almost' hardware back then, but it worked. 12 years ago. okay, there was no VOIP back then, but now there is, and it must work, and it must work well, or even work better than it does on Win, Linux networking is vastly superior than anything MS can cobble together / steal / or buy off a student, so why the sudden screw-up of  Linux audio,
why now ?


Pulseaudio hell is not just limited to the Ubuntu family though, in fact, in my tests its been broken in some way on every distro i've tried this year. one of the Pulseaudio dev's even expresses Ubuntu's nasty implementation of pulse.
http://0pointer.de/blog
If it sounds like i'm going to go into a diatribe about the where's and why's of how Linux audio was broken, i'm not. i have few answers. hack it, or dont use it.


i know we dont need pulse audio yet.
i know most of us want reliability now
i know most of us just dont want to have to dick around with the damn thing.
i know Pulse is the default audio, on most Linux distro's
i know it hasn't performed well enough on any distro i have tried in the last year
i know ALSA was'nt perfect, but why jump out of the frying pan,


- And what the hell was the big problem with ALSA / DMIX anyway ?
why in Ubuntu Jaunty do i have to remove Pulseaudio like Tux says here ?
remove pulseaudio in Jaunty
how do they release this without testing it a little more ? are Karmic etc all beta ?
Karmic KDE 9.10 messes up with phonon errors,  it brain farts and says something like


"KDE has detected that one ore more internal sound devices have been removed. Do you want KDE to forget about those devices? "


Dammit No !!  and so it falls back to HDMI audio output, it does this at seemingly  random boot-ups, which means, er, no sound really. this is a KDE Phonon bug, NOT a Ubuntu one. i much prefer KDE 4.x but its still buggy.


As for all my distro hopping lately, its been caused by wanting a solid multimedia distro,  but more modern than our old friend KDE 3.5.x i have to admit that MEPIS 8.01 is the most solid and least buggy Linux distro still current that i have found. i'm not including Slack Gentoo or Arch .. which are great distro's, but i think very old-fashioned  and time-consuming to set up and use.
with Mepis 8 and ALSA - it does my DVB (kaffeine) Skype, Amarok etc all at the same time. dmix.
nice work Warren, don't rush to 4.x mate.
download Mepis


Gnome is much less buggy than KDE 4.x, but it should be, its far older, and is a much more dumbed-down interface, you've much less control over the system and GNOME is so damn 'fugly' too, like some flat old 1990's OS. and it is.


Since Ubuntu is supposedly aimed at new users, maybe shipping with a working audio subsystem is a necessity ? or how are you possibly going to keep those people you've so publicly looked to recruit ? maybe a revert to ALSA ?


 And Pulseaudio,..  why ? - its not ready, maybe never will be, so why ship it ?
- some 'notional' network audio and routing capabilities that most of us are never really going to use ? and cross platform ? why ?
lets just worry about our platform for now.
In my tests pulseaudio cant reliably get audio from the mic and speakers in the same damn box, certainly not over a network, and its damn poor it does.
FAIL.


Ubuntu for newbies ? - but comes with the most unreliable, quirky, fiddly complicated buggy sound system... hmm.. whose idea was that then ?


No. i think you see the problem.
Issues like ditching Gimp are, in comparison, mostly irrelevant, the first thing newbies will probably want to do is to keep / junk / install their applications. and on any OS, Gimp is just one of these apps. but this is a side issue. lets move on.take damn Office out of the distro's too. i dont live in a office. .God NO !


I agree with Pat Davilla from the 'Linux Linc Tech Show' (radio show / podcast) about pulseaudio, that JACK for example, would be a much better candidate than pulseaudio.. and it has been used in a distro already. thanks Pat,
hear    Linux Link Tech Show     episode 333
have a listen to the show and if you're not subscribing to the podcast, whats' wrong with you ?!


Comments welcome, flames are directed to /dev/null !!