My case: I have an on-board sound card that I use for everything except for Skype, where I use my Logitech ClearChat Wireless USB Headset. It is easy in Skype to select a different sound device. So I needed to set my on-board sound card as the default output for everything else.

If they both use a different kernel module you can easily make sure the right one is the default card.

Find out what module is being used for your soundcards:

cat /proc/asound/modules

On my computer this gave

0 snd_usb_audio
1 snd_intel8x0


Sound card 0 is the default one (snd_usb_audio in this case). This is the module’s name.

You can’t assign card 0 because whichever card get’s loaded first get # 0. So, you have to assign # 1 to the one you don’t want as the default card. This can be done by adding one simple line to /etc/modprobe.d/sound (create it if it doesn’t exist):

options name_of_offending_module index=1

So, in my case this would be

options snd_usb_audio index=1

Reboot and try

via HOWTO make one soundcard default.

Now that you have your motion activated security camera system, you could make if safer by uploading the captured images automatically to a remote server just in case something happens to your computer. I’m using Slackware Linux but the setup should be very similar on other distributions.

1. Create an executable batch file containing the following (pico ~/batch_file):

   rsync -avz /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/cam1 destinationserver.com:~/

2. Edit /etc/motion.conf and add/uncomment the following line

   on_event_end /home/user/batch_file

3. Edit ~/.ssh/config (create the .ssh folder if it doesn’t exist) and add the following lines to it:
   

   
Host destinationserver.com
HostName destinationserver.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_dsa
User your_user_name

4. Install and setup keychain so that ssh doesn't ask for your pass-phrase every time it tries to connect. Take a look at this keychain/ssh-agent tutorial