If occasionally your sound stops working, you can try to restart the sound server:
sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart
If this doesn’t work, try to kill the processes that block it:
1) Identify them:
lsof | grep pcm
example output: esd 5080 name 70u CHR 116,6 13639 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
2) kill ’em:
kill -9 5080
3) restart alsa:
sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart
That should do the trick. Thanks to the person who posted it here.
Sometimes, after I copied files to my USB stick with Kubuntu Linux, the data was corrupted. Furthermore, the copying process seemed far to quick for USB 1.0. In order to make sure that all your data gets copied, change to the directory where to USB stick is mounted, e.g. /mnt/stick/ and use the “sync” command. sync will flush the file system buffers. After sync has finished, you can unmount the stick and all the data should be on it.
I could not play DVDs anymore after installing Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10). I always got a message “xine: couldn’t find demux for >dvd:///dev/scd0<“. In this forum I found people with the same problem. Apparently, installing the “libxine1-ffmpeg” library does the trick. This can be done easily: “aptitude install libxine1-ffmpeg“.
Look here first! 