Yesterday I spend the whole night tinkering around with my system to ensure my new sound blaster card works with ubuntu. The problem  is I 'm getting static sound in my machine although the sound card works perfectly well in WIndows. While browsing to various forum I discovered that this sound blaster card is known for having compatibility issues with most Linux distro. Many have suggested to initiate the card in windows first, before installing it in ubuntu, reason given was the firmware of the card can only  be initialised on a Windows operating system before running it on Linux. That is really peculiar, anyway is worth a try  to see if it works. Unfortunately it doesn't, some forums states that the sound blaster is not supported with ALSA drivers, instead they suggested using OSS drivers. So I switched to  the latter, although the hissing sound dissappear but now I have a bigger problem; "There is totally no sound". The site did mention that in some cases the OSS driver might failed to work properly with the card. Hence, I have no other option but to revert the sound driver to ALSA. I reboot my machine and to my surprise I was able to get a clear audio sound. I have traced my troubleshooting steps and conclude it below for future references.

Step 1 : Try initialising the card by installing it on windows operating system.

Do you know that there are some wireless routers out there that has the capability of a firewall to a certain degree. These routers can prevent unscrupulous individuals from accessing unwanted sites by setting access restrictions found on thier router page. The Linksys  WRT54G2 is one router which share such fuctionality. Internet access control is provided via the Access Restrictions features shown below.

Picture courtesy of PCWinTech.com

A  month ago we did a review on this HP Pavilion DV 2 1003AX, recently we got another order for the same unit but a slightly different model. The order came from Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, Tanjung Malim, Ipoh. They have requested for a HP Pavilion 1007AX which has a white chassis whereas the previous model is in brownish peach. Both of these laptops have the same specs, the only difference which separated this two is the choice of colours. For those of you who have missed the review you can find it here. Below are some snapshots taken of this current HP model.

What if your wireless signal is weak, and you wish to expand the signal range across other rooms in the premise, this is when an access point will come in handy. A high end wireless router with a "n range" with 3 antennas is considered suffice for small office (SOHO) and  everage home users, but it wont be enough if you wish to share the bandwith across 100 users. This is why we proposed our client to settle with an AP for each training room in his office. Shown below is a layout of what we'll be implementing soon for our client.

A power switch is broken in the front panel casing, the client immediately inform us to get a new casing to be replace urgently as the machine is being use at the reception counter of a hospital. Here are some photos  taken during the transfer process.