2007 Sep 17 - Mon

DirectSound Error 88780078

Sometime towards the end of July, I installed Windows XP latest sound stuff (Windows Media, DirectSound, etc), version 10 I think. I had been putting it off for a while. I had heard about licensing issues, codec problems, and such. In a moment of weakness, I clicked the Windows Update button and installed it. What a pain.

WinAmp plays fine most of the time. At some point in time, when it isnt' playing, and I 'do something', I have no idea yet, and when I go back to playing WinAmp, I'll get a message like:

Bad DirectSound Driver. Please install proper drivers or select another device in configuration. Error code: 88780078

Most of the time, I reboot my computer, and things magically fix themselves.

Upon further searching for solutions, someone pointed out a possible simple fix for my problmem of the DirectSound 88780078 problem:

• Right click on My Computer
• Manage
• Device Manager
• go down to where the exclamation point is
• Right click to Disable, then Enable it.

In this case, it solved my problem. Now I'd like to know how it breaks randomly in the first place. Some have said it has to do with VMWare. I do have VMWare workstation installed, but hasn't been running for a while.

Any suggestions?

I did come across Microsoft Knowledge Base article 29030. You can run a Windows Installer Cleanup Utility. It's first screen shows, ironically, "Welcome to the Windows Installer Clean Up Installation Wizard". When running the application after the installation, I don't see anything having to do with sound, so just cancelled out.

There are more interesting solutions at TechSpot.

[/Personal/Technology/AudioPhonics] permanent link

Configuring Wheel Mouse in Debian

I'm running Debian in VMWare in Workstation mode. My wheel mouse doesn't work automatically. I had to have the following configuration in /etc/X11/xorg.conf for it to work:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "CorePointer"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mice"
        Option          "Protocol"              "ExplorerPS/2"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "true"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
        Option          "Buttons" "5"
EndSection

[/OpenSource/Debian] permanent link

Debian's Firefox is Known as Ice Weasel, and breaks Google Toolbar

Ok, I might be behind the times somewhat, I havn't used Debian in workstation mode in a while. To date, I've been using it substantially in console/server mode. Today I found trying to get Firefox to run, while in workstation mode, to be an 'interesting' experience.

Using Debian's built-in browser, Konqueror, I went to www.getfirefox.com to download Firefox. The download worked fine, but figuring out how to install/run it was.., not possible.

A little web searching told me that due to some differences of opinion between MOzilla and Debian, Debian has decided to do things a bit differently. With an 'apt-get install firefox', you get the latest software, but under a new name: IceWeasel. All well and fine. Until I wanted to use the Google Toolbar.

It isn't possible to install the toolbar because Google checks the user agent string. So... the trick is to change the user agent string. Put 'about:config' in the address bar. You'll get a bunch of entries. To make it easier to find the needed one, put 'useragent' in the filter line. In the line for 'general.useragent.extra.firefox', change 'iceweasel' to 'Firefox'. Restart firefox. The Google Toolbar is now available.

So in summary, don't download Firefox from the Mozilla web site. Instead, obtain the Debian install package. A change to the useragent will be needed to make it 'more compatible' with plugins and such.

The other plugin I use is FireBug with Firefox. This is a handy tool for troubleshooting CSS and HTML code on a web page. Two cool things with FireBug: 1) as you pass over html code, it's area on the web page is highlighted, and 2) you can edit HTML and CSS entries to see their immediate results reflected in the browser. Installing this tool took one trick... when downloading, do a 'run with' firefox. A new window will open allowing the install to proceed.

[/OpenSource/Debian] permanent link