Upgrade to Edgy [...] sound and video format hell. PARTIALLY SOLVED

[Michael T. Richter]

OK, the sound issue is solved.  A painstaking examination of my
backed-up /etc and the new /etc found a key difference.  In the
file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base there are some interesting lines:


        # Prevent abnormal drivers from grabbing index 0
        options snd-bt87x index=-2
        options snd-atiixp-modem index=-2
        options snd-intel8x0m index=-2
        options snd-via82xx-modem index=-2
        options snd-usb-audio index=-2
        options snd-usb-usx2y index=-2


The one for "snd-usb-audio" is not in my Dapper configuration -- either
removed or never there in the first place.  I replaced "index=-2" for
that one with "index=0" and sound now works as expected.

This seems to me, however, to be an incredibly bad architectural choice.
On the one hand having USB audio devices moving to higher indices by
default while on the other hand having ALSA throw fits and give up when
there's no card at index 0 is a recipe for disaster.  Is there somebody
involved with the ALSA team here in Ubuntu who can pass up a message?
(Emails to the ALSA mailing lists in the past have resulted in precisely
zero acknowledgement of any kind so I'm not going to bother signing up
again to post this.)

Further, on the Ubuntu front, it's pretty damned bizarre that setting
everything to specifically point to USB Audio in
System->Preferences->Sound makes the system sounds still not work.  What
are the settings for if they're ignored by the very dialogue boxes that
they're set in?

So this leaves me now with the video format Hell.  I still can't play
videos in DivX/Xvid format despite having hunted and downloaded a DivX6
codec (or what was purported to be a DivX6 codec).  Interestingly now
the error message that pops up is different.  Before I hunted down this
codec it was complaining that the files (which, recall, I played only a
few days ago under Dapper without problems) were in the unsupported
"DivX 5" format.  Now that I have this codec it complains that it's in
the unsupported "Xvid" format....  I can't seem to win for losing on
this one.

So one outstanding question remains: how do I get Edgy in February 2007
to the point where it can do what Dapper did in July of 2006?

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20070208/ba2d0986/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20070208/ba2d0986/attachment.sig>