Miscellaneous Knowledge

I recently bought an Asus Xonar DX as I was getting fed up of the interference on my onboard sound card. However, as I use headphones I often need to use the soundcard’s functions to boost the bass a bit if I want to hear it. While most applications would go via the Xonar control panel and boost the bass, ffdshow would bypass it and not boost the bass. Hence, any movies I played where distinctly lacking bass.

To solve this, simply set Audio Channel to something other than “2 Channels” on the main section of the control panel. Don’t worry, the Xonar card automatically handles downmixing back to 2 channels (or whatever your Analogue Out is set as) for the actual output. This is simply the interface it presents to programs such as ffdshow. Now, ffdshow should go via the Xonar control panel and apply all the effects you’ve set, such as bass boosting.

Ever felt like trying out the KDE desktop interface, but didn’t fancy downloading Kubuntu and installing from scratch? Good news! You can easily install KDE from your current Gnome-based Ubuntu install and it’s dead simple.

Open up Synaptic Package Manager and search for “kubuntu” in the quick search, in the list of results select kubuntu-desktop and then click apply. Synaptic will then download and install all the files for KDE.

However, how do you switch to KDE from Gnome once it’s installed? Simply log out and then click your username as usual, at the bottom of your screen click Session and select KDE and then log in as normal. This time, instead of Gnome you’ll get the KDE desktop interface. If you want to switch back to Gnome just log out and select Gnome under session.

Now you can try out a new desktop interface without going through a lot of hassle.