Notes

To avoid getting the error “Your operating system does not meet system requirements”, I had to use User Agent Switcher to download the spreadsheet at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/TC300022771033.aspx for electric meter logging for energy efficiency. Then I used cabextract to extract the .cab file and used Open Office to view the 30002277.xltx file. Here it is saved using Open Office’s ODS format: electricity_tracking.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install wine1.2
wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks vcrun2005
sh winetricks d3dx9
wine regedit

• under HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine, create key Direct3D if it doesn’t already exist
• inside Direct3D create the following values:
  • string: DirectDrawRenderer value: opengl
  • string: OffscreenRenderingMode value: fbo
  • string: RenderTargetLockMode value: auto
  • string: UseGLSL value: readtex
  • string: VideoMemorySize value: (video card memory size in MB)

I fixed it by installing libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio (which replaces libsdl1.2debian-alsa). So it might be worth a try if you get sound problems with any other programs.

Source: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/372843

For some reason, Ubuntu Karmic wasn’t saving my sound volume and settings that I set using the Sound Preferences. After attempting to run alsactl store I got:

$ alsactl store
alsactl: save_state:1530: Cannot open /var/lib/alsa/asound.state for writing: Permission denied
$ sudo alsactl store
E: core-util.c: Home directory /home/mycurrentuser not ours.

So I deciced to change “/var/lib/alsa/asound.state” ownership temporarily to the current user and then was able to successfully save my sound settings (then switched back ownership to root). I also added “alsactl restore” to /etc/rc.local to automatically reload my sound settings when I reboot.

If your Ubuntu installation (or any other linux distribution that has a liveCD) is broken and can’t boot because of a faulty update, you can try to update your installation after booting from the LiveCD.

Start a terminal and use these commands (/dev/sda2 might need to be changed to match your configuration, you can use fdisk to figure out which partition is your main one):

sudo mkdir /media/karmic
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /media/karmic
sudo mount -o bind /proc /media/karmic/proc
sudo mount -o bind /dev /media/karmic/dev/
sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf /media/karmic/etc/resolv.conf
sudo chroot /media/karmic apt-get update
sudo chroot /media/karmic apt-get upgrade
sudo chroot /media/karmic apt-get dist-upgrade