Tag Archives: Ubuntu 8.10

Skype on Ubuntu 8.10

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Every time I reinstall Skype on Linux I lose sound for some reason. I can hear the other side, but they can’t hear me. I fiddle with the volume settings, and after a while it starts working. This time, I paid attention and made note of how I got it working. This post is as much for me as for anyone else on Ubuntu. :)

Firstly, under Options > Sound Devices I switched the output device to pulse. Then I set the input device to “HDA Intel (hw:Intel,0)”. Then I opened the volume control, enabled all the devices, and set Mic Boost to about 15%. That was the critical step. Now callers can hear me.

For the first time in my Linux history, I can now receive a Skype call and have music playing at the same time. Previously, I had to kill all other sound output before answering the call and I would only see it ring, not hear it. Much progress.

Here’s a random picture from a search for Skype on flickr to brighten things up a little.

Zend Studio garbled chars fix

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Following my post about installing Zend Studio 5.5.1 on Ubuntu 8.10, Gyorgy posted a comment about a problem with garbled characters. I had noticed the problem myself, but only briefly, I don’t tend to work with very large files. As yet, I hadn’t gotten a chance to look into it.

I spent some time on it today. Through this I found this thread discussing a similar problem with Netbeans. User cesc posted their fix (workaround?) which others reported to work. I figured the same option might work in Zend.

After a little digging, I have found that this approach works for me. I’ve tested with a 3k+ line file, and the bug is resolved. I’m running Zend Studio 5.5.1, Ubuntu 8.10, Sun’s JRE build 1.6.0_10-b33, compiz disabled. Zend appears to work with compiz enabled, but scrolling a 3k+ line file is very slow.

I edited file /opt/ZendStudio-5.5.1/bin/ZDE at line 1543 and added this:

# Hack in this option to solve garbled text problem as per:
# http://tinyurl.com/zendchrfix
options="$options -Dsun.java2d.pmoffscreen=false"

Here’s a patch for those who like that sort of thing. Hopefully this will help others with the same issue.