Today John T. writes:

Matt!!! Help! Somehow, I’ve managed to lock myself out of my Ubuntu PC. I am desperate, as I have tons of files on this PC that I need to get to. Is there a method I can use for lost Ubuntu password recovery? Thanks!

John, you are in luck as Ubuntu makes password recovery a snap. And by the way, thanks for taking advantage of my premium help option (no longer available) — it’s awesome folks like you, that make this website possible!  You asked this question yesterday and as promised, I am providing a solution in less than a day. Okay, back to your quandary…

The key here is being willing to write down the information on this page, so you can take it with you to the affected computer. I suggest writing it down, as you will need to follow these steps carefully, as to get things back up and running asap. (more…)

Today Cuan writes:

I’ve got an old compaq nx7300 laptop running Linux misq (more on that in a bit) that’s not switching the main speakers of when I plug headphones in. it used to work - I’ve had Ubuntu 10.04 / 11.10, Mint 11 (iI think), Peppermint (no idea which version) and others. now after I tried Pinguyos it’s not. I’ve also had Ubuntu 12.04 / Bodhi 1.3 installed and booted to a few others with no joy.

At one point I added lines to the alsa-base.conf (as per http://www.physicsforums.com/blog.php?b=2580) and it worked for a while then stopped (I’m not sure when it was a few days before I needed headphones again). Something else that worked for a bit was installing synaptic and removing and re-installing the sound components.

Any ideas of what’s going on or where I should look? I’m not a complete noob but not very well versed on Linux.

Hoping you can help

Well Cuan, I did a bit of digging on that particular notebook. As with any made for Windows notebook (see the sticker on there), Linux can sometimes be a dice roll as to whether or not some odd-ball compatibility issue might crop up. Thankfully however, your issue today is audio related and there are two different approaches to deal with this. First off, your notebook tested fairly well with Ubuntu it seems. (more…)