SPDIF out on Asus Mainboard
After the purchase of a desktop speaker (Behringer calls them Near Field Monitor but I wouldn't go so far) with digital in I was searching for some digital audio outputs on my ~1 year old computer. There aren't any. Apparently inside, on the mainboard itself there is a 4pin connector where you can plugin some kind of Asus specific SPDIF output bracket. Hey, this board is 1 year old. What shall I do with some useless 6channel analog output (which tends to distort with >50% volume) but no SPDIF? Even my laptop has it combined in its stereo out, at least Toslink.
So well, you can buy the blend in two different revisions, one with coax in/out (6pins), the other with Coax/Toslink out (4pins). Both are not produced any more, so you have to have some luck on ebay or so. At the moment, only 6pin-variants appear. Original price for these brackets is around 10€, now it tends between 1€ and 20€, dependent whether you are only one who needs it or not.
Boot loader mess
One thing I really dislike on Ubuntu/Desktop Linux. Each time I reinstall something, e.g. Windows7 (because Vista/32 was to buggy and cannot really work with 8gb of RAM and I need something to start C&C Generals you know). Anyway each time, the boot loader gets shot. Ok; thats Windows fault. But how do I easyly repair that? The web is full of easy-to-hardrange installation tutorials; but why not a simple button "repair my fuxxing boot loader" on the CD?. Now, when you use the wrong disc (a Ubuntu 9.10 disc instead of 9.04 - wrong labeled) it installs - without any message or something - grub2. Naturally incompatible with grub1 installed by all Ubuntu all the versions before. The first sign that something went wrong is a Grub minimal bash like shell telling you something.
So, for fast remembering; how to reinstall grub:
# boot from any recent OS CD, start terminal, get root # exchange /dev/sdb1 through the partition you installed you root ubuntu system # /dev/sda should be standard as target partition for grub mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/bla mount -o bind /dev /mnt/bla/dev mount -o bind /proc /mnt/bla/proc cd /mnt/bla chroot ./ grub-install /dev/sda