Then the worst thing that could possibly happen on my Gateway M250 happened…ALSA stopped working and there was no sound.  I started pulseaudio back up to no avail…no matter what I did, nothing worked to get sound up and running.

It was about the time I wanted to carve the sound pieces out of my laptop and throw them across the room that I decided to give everything I tried in the past one more try.

I fixed it…and I was pretty amazed that the solution was as easy as it was having spent weeks upon weeks fighting the pulseaudio issue.  I can only surmise that I made a typo in the module that I needed to blacklist.  After this arduous journey, it came down to blacklisting the modem sound card to make things work.

To do this on Mandriva and Unity Linux you’ll need to blacklist the following module:  snd_intel8x0m.  Notice the ‘m’ on the end of the standard module snd_intel8x0 for the ICH6 sound card.

You can do this by editing the following file as root in your favorite text editor:  /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-compat

Add the following line anywhere in this file:

blacklist snd_intel8x0m

After that, you can reboot to make sure the module is blacklisted.  I know there are more elegant ways to load and unload kernel modules but this is the easiest way to get the job done for new users.  Subsequent reboots resulted in still having sounds.  Thankfully, I didn’t have to rip my laptop apart in a quest to throw the sound portions.  I sure hope this helps others out!

ICH6 Intel Sound on Unity or Mandriva PulseAudio Fix originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on October 22, 2010.

PCLinuxOS has a rolling release cycle. With this type of cycle, updates are continuously applied to the software repository so much so that after a bit of time, a snapshot of the repository would constitute a new release…say 2007.01 or something similar. This has always been the way PCLinuxOS is released as many of us that have been with it since the early days can attest to.

The other nice thing about the rolling release cycle is that there are no set dates to releasing. This means that the release is up to the developers. As PCLinuxOS has proven many times over…it’s about perfection. Texstar doesn’t release until he feels everything has been thoroughly tested…so much so that he often times will hold off weeks at a time for a release just to clamp down on the final small bugs that might only effect 5% of the user base. The quality of product the dev team produces is astounding because of this.

The last thing I love about a rolling release is that updates are seamless. For many of us that had Preview .81 or .71 on our boxes in the earlier days of PCLinuxOS, we found that updating all the way to .93a was a snap. That’s right, 3-5 releases could be upated via synaptic without incident. This was a huge draw to me in the early days. PCLinuxOS was originally forked from Mandriva 9.2 and developed away from it…when we rebased this past year for 2007 it was due to glibc/GCC4 updates that our small developer team wouldn’t be able to do. This rebase would prevent a user from updating .71 to 2007 now…but the concept of seamless upgrades is still one that PCLOS developers strive for. It’s going to be quite nice as development continues to be able to do this.

Is PCLinuxOS and the rolling release perfect? No. Do others get it right with a standard release cycle? Yes. Could PCLinuxOS benefit from a standard release cycle? It depends on what your definition of benefit is. If, by benefit, you mean always maintaining a set schedule of releases and giving PCLOS a software development/business type of feel…yes, it would benefit. But if you’re thinking of benefit from the perspective of an active dev team that feels little pressure or deadline…a thriving community of satisfied users that can count on seamless upgrades…I’d say that NO it wouldn’t benefit PCLinuxOS at all.

I’d like to hear what readers think about rolling updates and how they see these as beneficial or not beneficial to a distribution. Thanks for reading!

The Absent PCLinuxOS Release Cycle originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on October 23, 2007.

Is this wrong? Not at all. Each day, many non-commercial distro makes wake up and check various distributions for updated security fixes. They pull source rpms, updated tar.gz’s, and debs into their distro, make minor adjustments, and drop it into their repository. Distros share with one another…they take and hopefully give back. If not monetarily, at least by the number of users that they have that may report bugs or provide fixes.

So what’s the beef that some Distrowatch Weekly commenter’s seem to have with PCLinuxOS? During the past 3 weeks of comments on the DW, some have been hounding PCLinuxOS with accusations saying that the developers hide things from their community and that PCLinuxOS eradicates changelogs and/or lights small dogs on fire while chopping kittens to bits in blenders, etc.

Myth #1: PCLinuxOS Hides the Fact it is Mandriva based (False)

PCLinuxOS.com has always had an “About” link on every single webpage it has ever had. Let’s look at what information has been conveyed there:

“PCLinuxOS was originally based on another distribution under the name of Mandriva
and shares many features of Mandriva such as the Control Center and the
Draklive Installer. Texstar and team would like to thank the
developers, contributors and others associated with Mandriva who may
have indirectly contributed to the PCLinuxOS distribution.”

Let’s look at some other distro front pages to see how they compare. Sabayon Linux has their footer at the bottom with Gentoo in it…but no mention on the front page as to what they’re based on. No real ‘about’ link there either. Move on to Ubuntu. No mention of Debian on the front page. You have to visit the Community >> The Ubuntu Story link in order to find that it is based on Debian. Once again, no ‘about’ link on the front page.

Let’s take a look at the PCLinuxOS Page on Distrowatch shall we? This has been utterly unchanged in 4 years:

“PCLinuxOS is an English only live CD initially based on Mandrake Linux
that runs entirely from a bootable CD. Data on the CD is uncompressed
on the fly, allowing up to 2GB of programs on one CD including a
complete X server, KDE desktop, OpenOffice.org and many more
applications all ready to use. In addition to the live CD, you can also
install PCLinuxOS to your hard drive with an easy-to-use
livecd-installer. Additional applications can be added or removed from
your hard drive using a friendly apt-get front end via Synaptic.”

If that paragraph is an attempt to hide things, I’m Miles Davis.

Considering these two points, I’d say PCLinuxOS hasn’t been ‘hiding’ the fact that it is Mandriva based. I’d say they’re doing quite well with where they have this information. I welcome any comments with information otherwise. If you have specific examples, please make sure they’re from a developer and not a general user…because if general users are where we’re getting our information from, every distro is in trouble.

Laying to Rest the Mandriva/PCLOS Debate originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on July 30, 2007.