Monday, August 18, 2014

Fix Missing TTY Terminal with nVidia GPU

So I had this long-running problem where as soon as I installed the drivers for an nVidia GPU, I'd lose the terminals (normally accessed by Ctrl-Alt-F1, Ctrl-Alt-F2, etc). The processes were still running, but nothing was visible. This was particularly annoying if I did anything to trash the desktop environment --- couldn't get access to a terminal to fix things.

Turns out the solution though is pretty simple: modify the file /etc/default/grub so that instead of saying "quiet splash" it says "nomodeset" (make a copy of your original grub file first to be safe):

#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset"

Then run sudo update-grub. Upon reboot, the TTYs will be visible again. Spews out the entire boot log to the screen as well, but that wasn't really a concern at all for me.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

Quick review: Comsol 3.5mm Audio Splitter

I bought one of these Comsol 3.5mm Splitters from Officeworks recently. Hoped it would duplicate an audio output to use on two devices, but it turned out to approximately halve the output level and muddied it up considerably (bass in particular sounded terrible). My fault for not researching first, but it is a little annoying that the advertisement or specs contain nothing to suggest how limited the device is.

In the scale of audiophile-ness, I'm a long way down the ladder, so if I can tell it's bad then it's must be really bad. (Maybe I was expecting too much?)

Do not recommend one of these at all.