Getting The Modem To Work In Hardy

If you upgraded your install from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron, your modem may not work. You need to install the new hsfmodem deb. If you have the older version of the Conexant Modem driver, please uninstall it before installing the new one.

You can find the driver here. This is only for the 32bit version of Ubuntu, the one I use and recommend. 64 bit users will need to go here. There is no deb for the 64bit driver so installation can be a bit of a chore.

After installing the modem driver, you might get a pop-up window telling you that the Volume Control has quit unexpectedly and asks you to reload (or not reload) the panel. Click on Reload. Afterwards, the sound icon on the top right corner of the screen changes to "mute", but sound should be fine. A logout/login or GDM restart should have solved the issue. This issue happens because the modem driver lays down its own set of sound codecs and unloads the snd-hda-intel module during the installation process. But it doesn't, when I tried to modprobe snd-hda-intel I received an error. If you check the comments Mmandx has found a workaround. You can download an version of the alsa-driver package (from the ALSA project) with improved support for the HSF driver here.

edited by pHreaksYcle

What is The Terminal & How Do I Find It

I realized that I talk about using the terminal a lot in this blog. Just about every guide asks users to fire up a terminal. I never have bothered to explain what it is or how to find it, and for that I'm sorry new Ubuntu/Linux users.

When I say terminal I really mean, a command line interpreter. The command line interpreter is a computer program that reads lines of text entered by a user and interprets them in the context of a given operating system or programming language.

The terminal gives you complete access to your operating system and often allows you to do things faster and more efficiently.

To access Ubuntu's terminal go to: Applications>Accessories>Terminal


It looks like this:


I know this may seem silly to many long time readers and hardcore Linux users, but if it wasn't for my buddy Muki showing me the terminal, I would have been asking this question to, or maybe I would have just googled it.

edited by pHreaksYcle

Fix PulseAudio - Play Video & Audio While Playing Flash

There is a known issue with Firefox/Flash and PulseAudio.

PulseAudio is the standard sound server in Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04. A sound server is a background process that accepts sound input from one or more sources (like your applications) and redirecting it to one or more sinks (like your sound card). Unfortunately it doesn't quite work with Flash 9 support in Firefox.

There is an easy fix:
In a terminal type:
sudo apt-get install libflashsupport

Now when you have audio and video playing, Flash will have sound and vice-versa.


To get the most out of PulseAudio, you may want to download and install the device chooser.

In a terminal type:
sudo apt-get install padevchooser
sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

edited by pHreaksYcle