I’m a bit annoyed right now. Yesterday i got fed up with that under Ubuntu all sounds on the output were noisy and quiet (the built-in speakers of the laptop sounded all right, but i hardly ever use those). I looked at the Ubuntu forums, and found a post asking about this very same problem. They sent that guy over to a page where the first link was a guide on how to install open sound (OSS) instead of ALSA. And i fool followed. First, installing OSS wasn’t simple. Included downloading loads of stuff and running home-made shell scripts i didn’t even know doing what. Before that Ubuntu produced noisy and quiet sound. Since then, none. So i wanted to revert back to ALSA–at least that worked somewhat. Unsuccessful. I tried reverting the steps of the OSS install, i tried following a guide on how to reinstall it, and tried running a supposedly installer script–but all failed. Then i wanted to reinstall Ubuntu as a whole. That would surely solve it. But i only had a 8.04 CD at hand, and that Hardy doesn’t recognise even my wired network card (or it does, but the main thing is that no networking works) (Asus A6M-Q035 laptop), so no updates, no use. Back under Windows i downloaded the 8.10 CD and burnt it, but it won’t boot. At all. I’m reburning it right now (i always use rw discs, and they worked fine, so i will use them later too).

All that was in vain, by the way. The problem was that the volume of my “CD drive” (in the mixer or volume control it goes by “CD”) was set too high (who would’ve thought that could make the normal sound output that noisy?). I muted it, and no noise. I hope i could get it working again.

Naturally the Total Commander CD/DVD burner plugin decides not to work properly only when i’m in a hurry. When else? This is not my day. (I hope tomorrow will be, with my linear algebra exam.)

Edit 16:30

And to further my happiness, the otherwise over-10M net in the dorm is for some reason under 1M, so downloading the alternative Ubuntu image takes about five hours (normally about ten minutes). I am overjoyed.