by Peter Ridge
Are you experiencing an intermittent popping sound from your speakers when nothing is playing? I encountered it after upgrading a PC with an HDA Intel audio controller to Xubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. It occurs 10 seconds after a sound stops playing because that’s when the audio chip is turned off to save power.
To prevent the popping noise, you just have to disable the power saving mode.
- With your favorite editor, open /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf as root (Important: Run the editor using sudo or gksudo to give it root permission. You can’t save the file otherwise.)
- Locate the line that reads, “# Power down HDA controllers after 10 idle seconds”
- Immediately following that comment is the offending option:
options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N
- Insert a hash # character at the very beginning of the option line to turn it into a comment. It should look like the following:
#options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N
- Save the file and restart Ubuntu
If you have a different sound controller and are experiencing this noise, look in the file for a similar-looking option (e.g., options snd-hda-something power_save…) and comment it out. Share your experience in the comments.
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by Peter Ridge
Do you see strange characters on man pages in your Cygwin? After upgrading to Cygwin 1.7, I noticed that the soft hyphens in man pages were replaced with the “â” character. Somehow, the character set wasn’t right. I remember having to deal with this problem several years ago, but couldn’t recall how I solved it. I found some old messages floating around the web going back at least a decade about setting environment variables, locales and whatnot to cure this. Fortunately, the solution turned out to be easy with the latest Cygwin and PuTTY.
As it turns out, Cygwin 1.7 now defaults to using the UTF-8 character set. PuTTY, at least on my system in the US, defaults to ISO-8859-1, a.k.a Latin-1. So, the fix is as follows:
- Open the PuTTY Configuration dialog
- Under the Window category, click on Translation
- In the “Character set translation on received data” section, select UTF-8 in the drop down list box
- Save the configuration
Now man pages look normal again. Of course, if you’ve changed the locale and/or character set in your Cygwin to something other than UTF-8, be sure to set PuTTY’s character set to match.
Are you using a different terminal/ssh program with Cygwin than PuTTY and encountering this? Share the corresponding steps to apply the cure for your terminal emulator in the comments.
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