Getting Skype Working on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic x86-64

Erik — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:58:11 +0000

So, recently, I installed Ubuntu karmic cleanly on my main desktop machine here at home, and I have really liked it. I even switched to KDE, and everything has been working better than it had been in GNOME. I tried setting up Skype the other day, and ran into an issue with the microphone. It turns out that since the new Skype uses PulseAudio, there’s a further configuration step that’s not so obvious. I found out here that you have to do the following:


sudo apt-get install pavucontrol
pavucontrol

Then, go to the Input Devices tab, and unmute the sound (click the little speaker with a red X until the controls at the bottom are enabled). Then, change the Port setting until you can see the bars move when you tap the microphone. Then try Skype. This worked perfectly for me – it’s too bad it’s not connected to the KDE sound mixer, but oh well. Maybe in the future that will happen.

How to set the RTC max_user_freq in newer kernels

Erik — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 01:03:07 +0000

I found out today how to set the real time clock max frequencies in Ubuntu since they removed the possibility to do it from sysutil.conf from newer kernels. Add the following to your /etc/rc.local or another startup script:

echo 2048 >/sys/class/rtc/rtc0/max_user_freq
echo 2048 >/proc/sys/dev/hpet/max-user-freq

Reboot, and you should get better performance from things like mplayer.

Schadenfreude » sound

Getting Skype Working on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic x86-64

How to set the RTC max_user_freq in newer kernels