Problems with NetworkManager and DHCP

I have great troubles with NetworkManager not being able to acquire an IP address via DHCP on my home network. By accident I killed it and it restarted and immediately acquired the address. It seems that this might be some sort of startup ordering problem.

The simple solution for now is to kill and restart NetworkManager and all is well.

How to enable MP3 playback with Amarok on Fedora 12

Set-up RPM Fusion repository to get the free and non-free components.

http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration

Install gstreamer-plugins-ugly
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/MP3_on_Fedora_Core

Kubuntu rides again

After installing Fedora 12 and having another round of sound problems after I thought I had it all working with Fedora 10 and 11 I thought I would try Kubuntu because previously everything just works with Kubuntu.

Well, much to my surprise, Kubuntu also has sound problems. So there was nothing else to do but start digging. After a bit of experimentation I was able to work out that I needed to make PulseAudio the default and tell Pulse to set-up an ALSA compatibility module.

To make Pulse the default create ~/.asoundrc with the following content.

pcm.!default { type pulse }

ctl.!default { type pulse }

Then set-up the correct modules for the pulseaudio daemon in the file /etc/pulse/default.pa

### Load audio drivers statically (it's probably better to not load

### these drivers manually, but instead use module-hal-detect --

### see below -- for doing this automatically)

load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0

load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:0

load-module module-alsa-card device_id=0

#load-module module-oss device="/dev/dsp" sink_name=output source_name=input

#load-module module-oss-mmap device="/dev/dsp" sink_name=output source_name=input

#load-module module-null-sink

load-module module-pipe-sink