developers > keep focus to the current window

Have you ever been typing away at a computer and another window pops up, or the mouse hovers over something that then pops up? Or typing a sentence on Facebook and the last word highlights to some user name? What about typing congratulations in Outlook or Word? Balloons galore? Ever have to cut/paste that? Or how about texting away on your phone and a notification pops up over what you’re doing? ARGGGH! Okay developers, quit with the cutesy stuff and keep the focus on the THE CURRENT WINDOW BEING USED. ALWAYS. NO DISTRACTIONS. Thank you.

ac3 pulseaudio

When you’re an executive producer and the artist sends you some surround sound files to listen to, well, you better listen to them. Easier said than done when it’s some DTS .cpt files rather than an .iso. I put an SPDIF card in my latest linux box, but ran it to my two-channel receiver. Moving it to my multi-channel receiver, I quickly realized that I was missing all the surround components for Pulseaudio.

Well, I’m not going to make a long story short; I’m not sure if I could retrace my steps even if I wanted to! But, here’s an outline:

After mucking about, I brought everything back to working life by following https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2022/04/pipewire-replace-pulseaudio-ubuntu-2204/ this very helpful post. Steps 1-4 and a reboot fixed nearly everything, I just had to add the following to get Gnome Sound Control responsive again.

sudo apt install libcanberra-pulse

Starting with a rock-solid two channel sound, it was time for surround drivers. The route was to get the Digital Stereo IEC958 to output to Digital Surround 5.1 IEC958/AC3. This took a couple of big, scary, unguided steps in the dark! First I created /etc/asound.conf and modified /etc/pulse/daemon.conf per https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DigitalAC-3Pulseaudio but honestly the same info is all over the web, with lots of different variations. Choose recent and choose wisely!

Then I did combo of two posts to get the A52 drivers installed. Yep, both fumbling around. First was the two steps from Oblib outlined here https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1608804 It kinda worked but kinda not. Then from this, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DigitalAC-3Pulseaudio I downloaded and ran the DigitalAC-3PulseaudioInstaller script and then did this extra step to the files I created with Oblib’s post.

sudo cp libasound_module_pcm_a52.so /usr/lib/`uname -i`-linux-gnu/alsa-lib/

Phew! Once that was done, a reboot was in order (after various alsa reload and pulseaudio –starts) and viola, I had this wonderful display on the old Marantz surround-sound receiver.

Even more fun was listening to

speaker-test -c6 -t wav

I know my posts have slowed down over the years, but I still like to be an itjerk every once and a while.