So I have lots of work(college) to do lately. For some reason OSX had been stuck in my head, so I grabbed a copy and decided to install it. Was going to do it in Virtualbox. The first thing I noticed after I installed virtualbox is that you have to be in the group vboxusers to run the program. I fecked that part up a bit. usermod is the command to change groups. A lower case -g changes your main group. I accidentally did that, and so removed myself from all the grops I should have been in. The consequences of this were not apparent straight away, but on next boot. Yup, no sound, no sudo access, lot’s of other weird problem. I though it was to do with my dodgy audigy 2 ZS that used to randomly disappear. I couldn’t get on board sound to work either. I eventually figured out today what the hell was going on. Long story short, “sudo usermod -aG video,adm,dialout,cdrom,floppy,audio,dip,video,plugdev,lpadmin,scanner,vboxusers ” seems to have done the trick. Obviously if you’ve looked yourself out from sudo’ing, you’ll have to log in as root.
Yes, I wasted a _lot_ of time on that this weekend.
What else. Getting rid of the silly USplash theme on ubuntu. Now I also have decent tty’s to use also. Its not hard. First figure out what video driver you are using. “grep Driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf”. It’ll probably be the last one, but you should recognize it. Then, you need to “nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer”, and comment out the line with your driver on it. Now, I should warn, the Ubuntu devs have blacklisted the drivers for a reason, that is, suspend is dodgy as fuck with them, and it is generally quite useable other wise under 2.6.20. Ok, when you have that done, you’ll need to “nano /boot/grub/menu.lst” and edit the line of the kernel you re using to something like “kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-9-lowlatency root=/dev/sda5 ro vga=795 “. Wha I’ve done there is got rid of quiet and splash, and added the vga=xxx part. The 3 numbers represent the resolution you’ll run. 795 is 1280×1024@24. Here is a table with various modes listed. Anyway, might be useful to someone.