Posts Tagged usb

Sansa MP3 player running Rockbox on Linux: Read only system

So I started getting this error today when trying to delete some files and load some new ones onto my Sansa MP3 player.  It would tell me that the file system was read only.  I tried a sudo chmod -R 777 but that didn’t work so off to google I went..

Finally found that by remounting the filesystem like this: sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/sdd1 /media/~ it fixed it up in a jiffy.  Well those are my paths and my device names so it would obviously be different for you but hopefully that helps

Now if this above solution does not fix your problem try to manually umount the mp3 player and then remount it with the following command options:

sudo mount -a -t vfat /dev/sde1 /media/~ -o user,exec,dev,suid,rw,umask=000

This solution will also work for USB flash drives that are being mounted with either root only write privileges or as read-only file systems

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How to mount a USB External NTFS Hard Drive that won’t mount in Ubuntu

So I was having a problem with my external USB hard drive lately.  The USB connectors on this LG laptop are a bit shady so things get disconnected if you bump them and this would happen with my hard drive.. The problem being that if the Hard drive was disconnected like this and not properlyy unmounted that it wouldn’t come back up 50% of the time when I plugged it back in.

It would show up when I run fdisk -l and in dmesg but when I try to mount the drive it would return with the error ‘special device does not exist’.  The only way I could get it back online was to reboot the machine, until now! :)

I tried installed usbmount and pmount but neither fixed the problem.

After some research I discovered the MAKEDEV command.  So what I tried was to run MAKEDEV from inside of /dev/ and it would give me an error: “.udevdb or .udev presence implies active udev.  Aborting MAKEDEV invocation.”

So I went on and looked into /dev/.udev/ and found a /failed/ directory which had a blocked file in there referring to the hard drive that wasn’t mounting.  For some reason I ran the MAKEDEV [device] command here and VIOLA, it worked.  Apparently it just needs to be run in a directory that doesn’t have a .udev subdirectory in it

So for me the command was MAKEDEV /dev/sdd and it created sdd1 through sdd10.  Not sure what the other ones are for but I was able to mount sdd1 properly and access my hard drive.  I mean this is a pretty backwards work around but I can access my hard drive without rebooting, so I’m good to go!

So to sum it up, if you have a device that isn’t mounting properly but you can see the device with #sudo fdisk -l then:

  1. try creating a temporary directory for your new mount points
  2. Then run MAKEDEV [device] inside of that directory.  So if the partition your trying to mount is say /dev/sda1 then you’ll want to run MAKEDEV /dev/sda and hopefully that gives you access without needing to reboot.

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Setting up a USB mic to work with Ubuntu, and specifically Teamspeak

Alright so you have a USB mic and Ubuntu is being a bitch about it.  Meaning it probably is thinking that your primary input device is in your soudn card somewhere as apposed to a USB port.. How on earth do we tell get Ubuntu to use the USB port instead of the Soundcard?  We’ll I’m glad you asked because coincidentally that is what I’ll be going over today :)

First thing first, for most all applications with the exception of those running in WINE, you can to get your butt over to this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578 and get PulseAudio installed.. Pulse is the key to running a proper sound server in Ubuntu(as long as you can get it running properly – something that took me weeks)

The key I found to making sure that pulse works properly in skype with multiple options for inputs is to make sure that in /system/preferences/sound you have everything on auto detect except for the Sound Capture – which is set to Pulse and that your Mixer track is set to ALSA PCM on dmix via DMA PulseAudio Mixer.

The other thing I found was that you NEED to make sure that your ~/.asoundrc file is blank.  This will become key as in the latter part of this post I will show you that you need to fill that same file with a bunch of good stuff if you want to run a USB mic in WINE appz.

So for a lot of you that probably does it for USB mics and Ubuntu.

Now for the rest of you running games and appz in WINE the story is a little different.  This is where my struggles with learning how to get audio properly working in a linux environment when from taxing to hellish.  First a word of advice to all of you wanting to use TeamSpeak and ubuntu with a USB mic or headset – USE WINE and the Windows version.  don’t even bother with the linux version as you will have days and weeks of your life sucked away.  It just doesn’t work

For some reason, at least for me WINE and pulse do NOT mix very well when it comes to the input side of things.  So when I want to use an ingame chat or Teamspeak the first thing I need to do is to shut down Pulse and rely soley on ALSA.  Now this means that a lot of the nice convenient mixer stuff that pulse does needs to be done manually. I posted all this up in the Teamspeak discussion forums and but I’ll save you the trouble of going there and copy it here as well

Now from this point onwards I am going to assume you are using ALSA , if not then you have your own google adventure to go on.

So:

go into your home directory (cd ~) and create a file called “.asoundrc” minus the quotations of course with your favorite editor ( vi ./.asoundrc ) if it doesn’t exist already.. If it does you need to make a backup of it and clear it all to start fresh
The .asoundrc file in your home directory acts as kind of a configuration file that is used to override default settings
Our goal here is to make our default capture device our USB mic and NOT our sound card, this is accomplished by inserting the following text into the .asoundrc file:

pcm.!default {
        type asym
        playback.pcm {
                type plug
                slave.pcm "hw:0,0"
        }
        capture.pcm {
                type plug
                slave.pcm "hw:1,0"
        }
}

***Something to note: “hw:0,0″ and “hw:2,0″ are MY card locations for my soundblaster and my usb mic. Yours might be different. ***

In order to find out what your desired output device is you type the following in terminal:

“aplay -l” and you should receive and output something like this:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 0: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 1: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 2: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 3: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Obviously My card is 0 as that is the only one that shows up, so I use “hw:0,0″ you need to make extra sure what yours is and use that.

now to find my capture device I type:
“arecord -l” and my output should be something like this:

**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 0: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 1: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 2: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: CA0106 [CA0106], device 3: ca0106 [CA0106]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: default [AK5370 ], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Now we already know that Card 0 is my soundblaster, which I don’t want to use, so we can rule that out.. The only other option(which is conveniently labeled USB Audio) is Card 2 so that means I used “hw:2,0″ . Yours could be different so edit your .asoundrc file accodingly.

I quickly check to make sure WINE was seeing my usb mic by running the command ‘winecfg’ and going into Audio and making sure that the ALSA WAVE IN device show up as USB Audio.

I have Hardware Acceleration set to Emulation as well as Driver Emulation checked on, not sure if it matters but it is on for me and works.

So there you have it, easy peasy!  Well it is easy to do but figuring this out with next to no documentation on this specific subject was a bitch..Hope this helped :)

After going through the same problem again and the above solution wasn’t working all that hot for whatever reason.

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm “combined”
}

pcm.combined {
type asym
playback.pcm “playback”
capture.pcm “hw:1,0″
}

pcm.playback {
type dmix
ipc_key 1024
slave {
pcm “hw:1,0″
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 4096
rate 44100
}
bindings {
0 0
1 1
}
}

ctl.dmixer {
type hw
card 1
}

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