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Yesterday I tried using the internal microphone on the ThinkPad R61 for the first time, in an attempt to make a Skype call. Skype kept saying there was an error in the sound configuration. After the usual Google searching and flailing about, I made the following changes to my system to fix the problem. It’s not clear whether all of these changes are necessary, but using them all certainly doesn’t hurt.

• In Skype’s Options / Sound Devices, change “Sound In” to the raw hardware device; mine was “HDA Intel (hw:Intel:0)”, but it will take some experimentation and some test calls to figure out the correct setting. Do NOT set it to “pulse”; there is a known bug in Ubuntu’s implementation of PulseAudio that causes delays of many seconds on microphone input.
• Also in Skype’s Options / Sound Devices, set both “Sound Out” and “Ringing” to “pulse”.
• Also in Skype’s Options / Sound Devices, it may be necessary to uncheck “Allow Skype to automatically adjust my mixer levels”.
• Right click on the task bar’s volume control (the speaker icon), and select Open Volume Control. Hit the Preferences button, and add the following two controls: Capture (Recording) and Input Source (Options). Then in the Volume Control dialog, in the Recording tab, bring up the Capture level to near full, and in the Options tab, set the Input Source to Internal Mic.
• Using sudo, edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base and append the line:

  options snd-hda-intel model=thinkpad

I didn’t find an easy way to reload the sound modules after the last change, so I had to reboot the system for it to take effect.

Note: these instructions apply to Linux Mint 6, and, presumably, Ubuntu 8.10. I can’t guarantee they’ll work on other versions of Linux or other machines.

The older computer on which I installed Linux Mint recently wouldn’t power off properly after a shutdown. This used to work on Mandrake 10.2. Apparently the problem is due to the newer Linux kernels requiring ACPI by default for power management, and this machine’s BIOS doesn’t seem to provide a compatible ACPI implementation.

After the usual slogging through Google search results and numerous experiments, the fix was extremely simple: add the following line to /etc/modules:

apm power_off=1

Several forum postings I found with Google suggested other solutions, including boot parameters and commenting out lines in various configuration files, but these weren’t necessary on this machine (which uses a Biostar M7VKQ motherboard).

I installed Linux Mint on my parents’ computer today, replacing Mandrake 10.2. (Yes, grandparents can use Linux.) This older computer has a motherboard with a built-in VGA adapter by Trident, connected to an ancient CRT display with a maximum resolution of 1024×768. But for some reason, Linux Mint set the resolution to 800×600, and the Screen Resolution tool in the Control Center would not allow it to be set higher.

After some Google searching, I came across some Ubuntu forum posts that suggested various fixes that did not work, or which required programs that were not available on the live CD. Finally, the thing that worked was quite simple: I edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and in the “Monitor” section added the following line:

HorizSync 28 - 60

After restarting X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and logging back in, the Screen Resolution tool now showed a number of newly available screen resolutions, including the desired 1024×768. Apparently, the Trident display driver (or some other piece of X) wasn’t able to detect the monitor capabilities automatically (perhaps due to the monitor’s extreme antiquity), and the new line in xorg.conf provided just enough of the required information.

I recently switched my two main laptops to Linux Mint. I’ve been running KDE-based Linux distributions for years, and this is my first experiment with Gnome. Right away, I discovered that there are apparently no Gnome applications that can resize multiple images as easily as the premier KDE photo application, Digikam. GThumb, an otherwise decent photo viewer, has a memory leak bug in its “scale images” feature that quickly brings the system to its knees; this bug was supposedly fixed long ago but has resurfaced in Ubuntu 8.10. The batch plugin for Gimp looks like it ought to work, but almost always fails with various errors.

At this point, I resorted to using the ImageMagick “convert” command-line tool to resize images, which works fine, but is a little inconvenient, because it’s not possible to visually select the images for resizing.

I then came across a variant on this idea that works with Nautilus, the Gnome file manager. I took the script from this blog posting, then hacked it up a little to eliminate the renaming steps. This works quite well. You select one or more images in Nautilus, right click on them and select Scripts / Resize_Images. The script pops up a dialog asking for a maximum resolution. Then it starts to resize the images, placing them in a new subdirectory resized_to_NNN, where NNN is the new image size. It displays a progress dialog during the process.

I’ve placed a copy of my hacked version of the script here. After downloading it, move it to the ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts directory and make it executable using chmod +x Resize_images.

There is one serious problem with this script: the dialog boxes it pops up almost always end up being hidden behind other windows. This is a known bug with Zenity, the application used by the script to display dialogs. The problem and workaround are described in this bug report.