The short answer is to install pavucontrol

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

Then run pavucontrol and turn your internal mic off and Phonon will then use your USB Clearchat. Enjoy

An example where we use it is when building Magento templates and themes, we copy the directory structure across but not the files so that when we need to, we can copy a file across from the base theme without having to create the directory structure before copying the file:

rsync -av --include='*/' --exclude='*' app/design/frontend/base/default/ app/design/frontend/default/default/

High Quality – File size ends up being larger than the M4V
for i in *.m4v;do ffmpeg -i $i -ar 22050 -qscale .1 ${i%.*}.flv;done
Quality is almost indiscernible from the original M4V in a laptop
for i in *.m4v;do ffmpeg -i $i -ar 22050 -ab 96k -qscale 2 ${i%.*}.flv;done
Slight degradation in quality. File size approx. 35% less than the original m4v.
for i in *.m4v;do ffmpeg -i $i -ar 22050 -ab 96k -qscale 5 ${i%.*}.flv;done

Mass delete core dump files safely.
find . -type f -regex ".*/core\.[0-9]*$" -exec rm -v {} \;

Disable Core dumps system wide

1. Touchpad isn’t recognised as a touchpad but rather a mouse and so can’t “disable touchpad while typing” causing me to constantly bump it.
2. Suspend / Resume isn’t working.. I will fix this soon (fixed: 26/07/11)
3. Slight high-pitched noise coming from built-in mic. (fixed: 26/07/11)
4. Don’t run ecrypt-fs on your /home partition. It causes a lot of freezing.
5. My grub config now /etc/default/grub now has the following. The semaphore line fixes some small temporary locks in 3D graphics. ie: if you run glxgears and it freezes every 10 seconds or so, the semaphores line fixes that. The pcie_aspm=force switch is supposed to fix the 2.6.38 kernel issue consuming up to 30% more power. I haven’t noticed a great difference though. I get about 4.5 hours of continuous use. Remember to run grub-update after making the changes.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.semaphores=1 pcie_aspm=force"

So, fixing number 1 took a few goes to track down. Basically, the kernel isn’t detecting the Touchpad properly and everything loads as a mouse.

You need to rebuild the mouse kernel module, so combine the steps from this url

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9175201#post9175201

but when you get to Step 5, use this patch instead:
wget -O 01elantech_2.6.38.patch https://launchpadlibrarian.net/71387234/01elantech_2.6.38.patch
patch -p1 < 01elantech_2.6.38.patch

You will probably have to: sudo apt-get install gsynaptic also.

Update: 26/07/11

Finally, the suspend issue bugged me enough to find an answer. Following the steps in this post to get pm-suspend to finally work did the trick!

ls /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ehci_hcd/

Gives me:

0000:00:1a.0
0000:00:1d.0

Replace below XXXX:XX:XX.X with your
#!/bin/sh
# File: "/etc/pm/sleep.d/20_custom-ehci_hcd".
case "${1}" in
hibernate|suspend)
# Unbind ehci_hcd for first device XXXX:XX:XX.X:
echo -n "XXXX:XX:XX.X" | tee /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ehci_hcd/unbind
# Unbind ehci_hcd for second device XXXX:XX:XX.X:
echo -n "XXXX:XX:XX.X" | tee /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ehci_hcd/unbind
;;
resume|thaw)
# Bind ehci_hcd for first device XXXX:XX:XX.X:
echo -n "XXXX:XX:XX.X" | tee /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ehci_hcd/bind
# Bind ehci_hcd for second device XXXX:XX:XX.X:
echo -n "XXXX:XX:XX.X" | tee /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ehci_hcd/bind
;;
esac

And then add

#File: "/etc/pm/config.d/usb3-suspend-workaround".
SUSPEND_MODULES="xhci"

First we add in the Epel repo for 64bit Centos5
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

and then you need to disableexcludes in yum due to Cpanel disabling Perl from yum updates. So to install git now, we run.
yum --disableexcludes=main install git

Simple, really.

sudo dmidecode –type 17

This gives the following output:

# dmidecode 2.9
SMBIOS 2.4 present.

Handle 0×1100, DMI type 17, 27 bytes
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0×1000
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 64 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 2048 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: None
Locator: DIMM_A
Bank Locator: Not Specified
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Speed: 667 MHz (1.5 ns)
Manufacturer: AD00000000000000
Serial Number: 00001016
Asset Tag: 000818
Part Number: HYMP125S64CP8-Y5

Handle 0×1101, DMI type 17, 27 bytes
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0×1000
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 64 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 1024 MB
Form Factor: DIMM
Set: None
Locator: DIMM_B
Bank Locator: Not Specified
Type: DDR
Type Detail: Synchronous
Speed: 667 MHz (1.5 ns)
Manufacturer: AD00000000000000
Serial Number: 00003160
Asset Tag: 410801
Part Number: HYMP112S64CP6-Y5

You can read Fontis’ Australian Magento post here.

One struggle I did get stuck on is the “Access Denied” message when connecting. A lot of people are having issues with it. My issue was that I had used the same username for my API access as I use to login to the admin in my testing. As soon as I changed from that, I overcame that issue.

Anyway, I stumbled across this Python Magento library and saw it had a number of useful functions already in it. So I decided to hack away and add to it.

So far, I have added a function to retrieve the list of categories and write them to a file from the catelog_category.tree api call and finally, as per my original intention, write a function to bulk upload categories from a CSV file.

I’ve never contributed code to a project before so if I get these changes in, it’s my first public contribution.. until that happens, you can hit me up for the code and a sample CSV file.

I might add: Python xmlrpc is beautiful to work with and gives a great deal of flexibility for building a gui on top of this. Working with the Magento API was nice also.