Linux rdesktop, sound and Fedora

I use ‘rdesktop’ from my Linux box to connect to a Windows machine. rdesktop can forward sound using the “-r sound” option, but it stopped working in Fedora 11, when PulseAudio made its appearance.

The reason is because:

  1. rdesktop uses the obsolete OSS sound device /dev/dsp
  2. Fedora/RedHat disables OSS sound support so that it doesn’t conflict with PulseAudio

The workaround, for now, is to, run this, as root:

sudo modprobe snd-pcm-oss

Backup and Incomplete Restore

It’s a pain to recover from a failing hard drive, even months after the fact. The hard drive in my Linux server (a laptop), started going bad in May or June. Since it was still under warranty, HP replaced it.

Before I sent the drive back to HP, I copied what I could recover from it, and I restored the other files from backup. Or at least, so I thought. Tonight, I discovered that my music collection is missing. The file folders are there, but the mp3 and vorbis files aren’t. Not a big deal, since I have the CDs, except for the few albums that I purchased as mp3s. “What else is missing?”, I wondered.

find $HOME/Photos -depth -type d -empty

It turns out that some of my photos are missing as well. It’s a good thing I didn’t delete my backups once I thought I’d completely restored from them.