Logitech USB Headset and Linux

I’ve been having a battle with my Logitech USB headset over the last couple of days. If there’s on thing I liked in Windows a great deal, that was the simplicity of the USB headset.

If I plug it in, all the sound would be defaulted to the headset. When unplugged, the sound would go back to the sound card. It was beautiful.

Linux, on the other hand, wouldn’t play like that. SUSE’s YaST doesn’t like the USB headset. It knows that something is there. It even knows that there is some sort of sound device there. But it doesn’t recognise it. Neither does it want to know.

I was having all sorts of grief the thing. In fact I couldn’t tell whether it was working or not half the time.

I hit the Novell SUSE Hardware forums and posted a request, and received the following advice:

As far as I understood the wrong driver gets selected during boot.

add “audio” to “/etc/hotplug/blacklist”, plug in the headset and then
reboot. /proc/asound/cards should show something like “USB-Audio – C-Media
USB Headphone Set”

alternatively edit /etc/modprobe.conf (or modprobe.conf.local):
alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0
alias snd-card-1 snd-usb-audio
options snd-intel8x0 index=0
options snd-usb-audio index=1

After rebooting the USB Headset didn’t seem to appear in YaST again. However, KMIX and QAMix both recognised the new hardware device.

After switching off ‘mute’ for the headset mic (which is enabled by default), everything seems to work.

The only catch is that I have to have the headset plugged in when I start Linux, and I can’t reconnect it during a session. B’ah!

The good part is that Skype works a treat now.

Win2Lin Day 2

So here I am on the Linux PC.

I’m growing increasingly frustrated at the various flavours of Linux, and the subtle differences between them. So much so that I can’t even find a simple command line to restart the samba server.

the IMAP server seems to be fickle. I can’t get Squirrelmail to show me the inbox. It could possibly be due to the vast number of emails that I have copied in. Yet, I thought that’s the whole point of IMAP – to work speedily across a network? Hmm.

fetchmail and fetchmailconf caught me out a couple of times today. The final moment was when the fetchmail daemon wasn’t downloading my emails. I realised that I had configured fetchmail as my user, rather than the root. So I had to copy the data from /home/user/.fetchmailrc to /etc/fetchmailrc. Once that was done, the mails seemed to drop in correctly.

Openoffice read my rotas that I put together in word correctly. I saved the latest version as an rtf and htm for distribution, rather than doc.

Worryingly, file access seems to be stalled. Accessing the root folder or simple tasks like deleting file seem to take an unnecessarily long time.

I also managed to get the HP Laserjet 1100 through the Intel Netport Express working by using a hybrid of editing the hosts file and printing directly via IP to the print server.

It’s been a long day, but I’m gradually getting things sorted. There’s plenty more ahead though 🙁

ARGH! My emails!

I’m in the middle of a worrying situation.

After carefully copying all of the relevant emails over to the IMAP server on the Linux machine, I seem to have misconfigured something and had to reset the server and the services.

When everything fired back up, all the emails had disappeared!

I’m just trying to get everything back on, and then immediately back it up. I think a daily backup of the IMAP server might not be a bad idea.

On the plus side, I have managed to get squirralmail and nocc working on the apache server without any hitches.

I hope that I can have it running smoothly by the end of today.

Win2Lin Day 1

I had Steve around my place today to help me set up the Linux box and ensure that the platform material is working correctly.

The major tasks today involved configuring Apache with PHP 5 and mySQL.

Thankfully, SUSE 9.3 comes with mySQL 4.1, saving a great deal of aggravation. The catch is that SUSE 9.3 seems to come with PHP4. So the task to set to was to effectively install some elements well. A key program to install is apt-get, which I found through FalkoTimme.com’s guide to The Perfect Setup – SUSE 9.3.

Once apt-get is installed, you can download the appropriate updates by following the instructions. This has enabled us to have a system working as well (if not better), than the previous Windows system.

Next move was to install remote support over a number of alternate sessions. This is possible in Windows XP SP2 with the appropriate BETA hack.

There’s still a great deal to do. The first step is to convert my Outlook 2003 data, and get all my PIM stuff working on Linux…

Win2Lin Begins

As if Windows sniffed out my intentions, it refused to boot this morning. Only 1 day after I thought I’d give the Linux platform a proper go.

So now I’m running SUSE 9.3 which installed from the DVD a burned a few days ago fairly easy.

I’ve cheated somewhat though – I’m using a friendly KDE inteface for all my woes. And YaST is doing most of the configuration.

Which really should be how it is.

My first trouble was getting onto the internet. I like my work PC to have a manual IP address on my network for remote access purposes. In Windows, all the IP settings that I need are in a single friendly tab. YaST sees them dotted around in 3 different menus.

Not incredibly intuitive to begin with. And there have been other issues, but it’s almost midnight and I have another computer to build before tomorrow. I’d better get cracking.