I had thought that I would be able to successfully solve the no sound problem in my Fedora 4 somehow, but it wasnt to be before a lot of trying. I thought it was a drivers problem and tried to install ALSA drivers and still nothing happened. I tried to work around with other things but to no avail.

Eventually, I burned a mini network install CD of SuSE 9.2 and installed that. This made things worse. The sound card was being detected as usual, but the sound wasnt there. Along with that the touchpad also stopped responding properly and the USB mouse couldnt scroll. I dumped it all again and installed Fedora 4 again. This time, I just tried to tweak things here and there, but after some time I again could come up with anything. What amazed me most was the fact that no such problem had been mentioned anywhere on the net and nothing good came up on google. Karthik, a fellow Graduate Assitant at ITL, helped me and he also couldnt come up with much until we hit the jackpot.

The problem is that Linux has a line sensor feature that wasnt working properly. We connected a set of headphones and found that it was working fine. And once we disconnected them, the PC speakers also responded. Since then they have been working perfectly.

So moral of the story is that, If your sound card is being detected and you are not able to hear any sound (after checking that nothing is set to mute), just connect a pair of headphones to the laptop and then remove them. It will solve the problem for good.

I am now using Fedora 4 happily.

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• Finally…. Fedora Core 4

I am a total believer in the above stmt. I have found that I cant seem to stay put with one OS. I reacently got an external harddrive, 120GB Western Digital, and that meant that I had a lot more space on my 60gig laptop drive.

So I decided to reinstall a linux distro. Well…. I had had experience with SuSE 9.2 Pro, RedHat and Fedora Core 3. So, conforming to the above stmt, I decided to try some new distro. Thats when all hell broke loose.

I started by trying to get Ubuntu 5.04 to work. I really like what they have done with the theme. But I didnt like their installation process. Nothing can match the installation process of Fedora or Gentoo; Fedora makes it so darn simple while giving you so many options, where as Gentoo makes is so darn difficult, but gives you total control on how you want the system to be.

Next I went ahead and downloaded Gentoo Linux. It was fun to begin with…. was very inspiring (dont know why) and I really liked it, till the time I reached “dependency issues”. I got so frustrated, that I just dropped the whole idea and went back to Ubuntu. After a few days, I was talking to this friend of mine who had Gentoo on his laptop and it just made me give it a go again. I started the installation again and all went well. I even installed the GRUB and restarted the machine. Just so happens that I screwed up grub.conf and then system wont boot into the gentoo linux which i had very cutely renamed as Nalin’s Linux. Have decided to wait for the Gentoo XLIVE CDs to come out before I give it a go again.

The ordeal wasnt over yet. I started checking out other distros online. Came up with Debian 3.1 Sarge. Thought about it, seemed good. So downloaded and installed it. I hated the console mode install. And once I started the system, I hated the interface too…. U might be calling me dumb, as all the interfaces of linux are same(other than SuSE which is distinctivly different)…. but, I didnt get a good feel.

So I again went on search and finally decided upon Fedora Core 4. I love it. It’s almost the same as Fedora 3, but the interface is better supported as there are better drivers for my Nvidia Graphics Card. The sound card is giving me problems but I will soon fix that too. Also, the wireless is woring on my lappy. Ndiswrapper is a great tool.

Will update later on my quest with Linux.

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• Finally…. Fedora Core 4 – Part II