Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 24,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

So, one of these days, you will find yourself wanting to unmount a partition on your linux box. Problem is, most of the time, the partition is most likely still being used by some process, or by someone. So first, you need to find out which processes are keeping the drive busy, by:

root@Mach5-NX:~# fuser -m /media/prison
/media/prison__:      3196c  3285c
root@Mach5-NX:~# ps -ef | grep 3285
ikhsan    3285  3196  0 07:07 pts/1    00:00:00 vi lgf.conf

With that information in hand, you can start shutting down services, or killing the process that’s preventing you from unmounting the partititon:

root@Mach5-NX:~# kill 3285

Repeat the step above for each process listed on the previous command.

Or, if you’re feeling nasty, you can always kill all the process that’s using the partition, by issuing:

root@Mach5-NX:~# fuser -km /media/prison
/media/prison__:      3350c  3437c

Unmount the drive normally

root@Mach5-NX:~# umount /media/prison

…And we’re done

I think I’m gonna skip this one, since I already have the Frozenbyte bundle, and Frozen Synapse.. well.. doesn’t excite me.

• At least 5.1 capable sound card. Since I’m going to hook this up on my Vaio, VPCEA36FG, USB connectivity is a must

• A 5.1 speaker set, analog or digital

After a bit of googling and browsing, I have two choices for sound card. The first one is Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi 5.1 Surround Pro, and the second one is a cheap C-Media 5.1 external sound card. I heard much success with the later, while installing the former might require me to ditch Pulse Audio, updating ALSA, etc etc. Also I can’t find a single forum post regarding the X-Fi and Maverick. There are a lot of posts about the X-Fi with Jaunty or Lucid, but no Maverick.

Anyway, finding shops or stores that sell the C-Media or the X-Fi card turned out to be quite a task. The X-Fi has not been in stock for quite sometime, and my search for the C-Media on every local brick and mortar and online shops in Indonesia, came out with empty. At the end, I asked a friend to get me the C-Media via dealextreme.com (since I don’t own a credit card)

Next, the speakers. There are several choices available on my price range from Creative, Edifier and Logitech, and I went with Logitech Z506. It’s cheap and quite easy to setup, and has a very decent sound output for the price. Plus, it support multiple inputs, so I can hook up the 36GF and my TV at the same time. Luckily, during my speaker hunt, I found one shop that carry the X-Fi 5.1!

Setting up the Logitech Z506 is very easy and straight forward, since everything is color coded. The Z506 can accept sound input via 2 RCA connector or from 1 (for stereo) or 3 (for analog 5.1 Surround) audio jacks from a sound card. Connecting the front audio jack to the 36FG internal sound card produced stereo output from all of the satellites, so everything is working. Next, surround sound

The X-Fi SP 5.1 connects and draws power via USB, so you need to plug it directly to the notebook, or like me, hook it to a powered USB hub ( mine is a Roccat Apuri). The X-Fi should be automatically detected by Maverick, you can check it by typing “lsusb”

ikhsan@Mach5-NX:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 118: ID 046d:c52b Logitech, Inc. Unifying Receiver
Bus 002 Device 117: ID 1058:1102 Western Digital Technologies, Inc.
Bus 002 Device 116: ID 041e:30df Creative Technology, Ltd
Bus 002 Device 115: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB-2.0 4-Port HUB
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0489:e00f Foxconn / Hon Hai
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0c45:6409 Microdia
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

or go to System > Preferences > Sound, and open the “hardware” tab. The X-Fi is listed, but on the profile dropdown menu, you will see that no profile for 5.1 sound is available… yet.

Sound Preferences

To make things easier, install the Pulseaudio Volume Control by opening terminal, and do:

ikhsan@Mach5-NX:~$ sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

Next, edit the /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

ikhsan@Mach5-NX:~$ sudo nano /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

Find “; default-sample-channels = 2″ and change it to “; default-sample-channels = 6″, save, and restart Pulseaudio. Open the “pavucontrol” by pressing Alt+F2, and type “pavucontrol”. On the configuration tab, select “Analog Surround 5.1 Output + Analog Stereo Input” for the X-Fi profile. You can also do this via Sound Preferences.

5.1 Surround profile for X-Fi

..Next, connecting the X-Fi to the Z506. This is straight forward, as everything is color coded. Connect all of the three audio jacks from the Z506 to its corresponding port on the X-Fi. Now to test the 5.1 output, open System > Preferences > Sound, select the hardware tab, select the X-Fi from the list, make sure the 5.1 Surround profile is selected, and then press the “Test Speakers” button. Press each “test” button to test all of the speaker components

Speakers test

..And done. To set the X-Fi as the default sound output, go to System > Preferences > Sound, and select the X-Fi on the output tab.

Default output

To individually set the output level of the satellites and the sub, open “pavucontrol”, and find the X-Fi entry on the “Output Devices” tab

Output level

Next on the list is to try some 5.1 encoded videos. I’ll report back as soon as I’m done!

Start tag expected, '<' not found.
Location: '/home/ikhsan/VirtualBox VMs/itiay-win7/itiay-win7.vbox', line 1 (0), column 1.
/home/vbox/vbox-4.0.4/src/VBox/Main/src-server/MachineImpl.cpp[679] (nsresult Machine::registeredInit()).
Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: VirtualBox
Interface: IVirtualBox {d2de270c-1d4b-4c9e-843f-bbb9b47269ff}

It seems that during a recent restart, the .vbox configuration file for the corresponding vm was screwed. Luckily the virtual hardisk file (.vdi) was still intact, and I was able to recover the data from the damaged VM by creating a new VM, and point the new VM to use the old .vdi from the previous VM.

First, on your grub screen, locate the entry that you want to setup as the default choice. In my case, it was my Maverick install, located at 7 from the top.

Next, open the /boot/grub/grub.cfg,

ikhsan@Mach5-NX:/$ sudo nano /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Find the line that says set default=”0″ , change it to set default=”7″  or whatever the correct number on your system is

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header ###
if [ -s $prefix/grubenv ]; then
  set have_grubenv=true
  load_env
fi
set default="7"

…and then reboot.

So I look around my drives, and found an .ISO for Natty. I was planning to skip Natty, since the review for Unity is so bad, and Maverick provides everything that I need. But It can’t be helped. So burned the .ISO to a DVD, and away I.. went.

Anyway, on my fairly-specced VPCEA36FG, Natty installed smoothly. Everything is automatically detected and just work. And to my surprise, hibernate works perfectly. On the negative side, operating feels a bit sluggish and everything seems so slow. And I just can’t stand Unity. I can’t stand that the launcher bar hides and reveals ever so slowly, and sometimes refuses to show at all. I can’t stand how it stutters when shifting between workspaces, and I can’t stand Firefox needing a full 5 seconds to launch. To sum up:

Improvement from Maverick:

• All of the VPCEA36FG peripherals are detected
• Hibernate works perfectly
• …that’s about it

What I hate:

• Unity sucks. Or maybe require more that a lil bit of getting used to
• Slow. Frustratingly slow
• Battery life down from more than 3 hours to over one and a half hours. I managed to bump it to a little over 2 hour by installing laptop-mode-tools package (which remove acpi-support and pm-utils) from Synaptics
• It seems that the laptop run hotter that it used to. The fans are almost always active
• Lot’s of tool that I use extensively on Gnome2 such as the global proxy setting tool are missing

So, finally, I was able to restore my Maverick install, but then decided to keep Natty to toy around. Since I hate Unity,  and since Gnome 2 will stop receiving updates, I think it’s time for me to explore the alternatives. My first choice went to Gnome 3′s Gnome Shell.

Equally despised just like Unity, I’ve read a lot of bad things about the dumbed down interface of Gnome-shell. To my surprise, I quite like it. Yes, it’s not as versatile as Gnome2, but it has it’s own charm. One major problem though. Currently Gnome-Shell does not work with FGLRX, so I need to use the open source ati drivers, which admirably works quite well for Google Earth and a few 2D games that I throw at it.

Gnome-Shell's Activites

Gnome-Shell's Calendar

I like how everything seems to work together and behave in similar manner. It didn’t feel like someone took desktop components from here and there and created a mash-up. Yes, currently it lacks a proper configuration tool like Emerald theme manager or CCSM, but that didn’t keep some people from making customization in the form of Gnome-Shell extensions.

I think I’m going to keep Gnome-Shell for a while, and went to XFCE next.