Audio Static In Linux Mint No More

I’ve posted a couple of times that I have had audio static issues in my Linux Mint 14 install. I completely forgot to post that it was fixed thanks to the Linux Mint community over on Google Plus.

Here’s is what was posted there:

Hmm… being intermittent like it is, and not being external, it could be a timing problem. You could try editing /etc/pulse/default.pa, search for the line:
‘load-module module-udev-detect’
and edit it to:
‘load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0’
If there’s any options past “detect” then just comment the line out (so you can restore it if needed) and add the new setting below it.

You’ll have to reboot to be sure the new setting takes effect. If it’s a timer/scheduling problem that should take care of it, if the problem’s with Pulse to begin with.

Free Asset Management Database

If you are not aware, I work in IT. Recently, my company was looking for a good asset management software. In my research I came across a large choice of free solutions. In that free allotment I came across one that would be perfect for a small office business or even home office; it’s called IT Items Database and can be found here. The only issue is that it is web based and requires a web server to be running at all times. Luckily for me that was not an issue. I have a media PC I use for watching movies, mostly, that is up all the time and not used on a daily basis and on this machine I run VMware Server. I believe the product has reached end of life but I am sure it can still be found somewhere on the internet. Well on that machine I have a dedicated Linux Mint server. I use Linux Mint 12 on a daily basis on my home desktop machine also but I use the virtual server within VMware for dedicated services, like a web server. Well, because I have so many devices in my home (what home doesn’t these days?) that I decided to test out the ITDB for my own assets. Here is what I did.

First, I followed this guide to install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Basically, in Linux Mint, at the terminal you type:

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

Then, if you want to manage MySQL, install phpmyadmin by typing:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql phpmyadmin

For a complete guide just check out the link above.

Next, I went to Sivann’s software and downloaded IT Items Database and followed his installation instructions. For Linux Mint I copied the ITDB folder to /var/www and renamed the database file per his instructions. Thereafter I had to give the database file and the directory permissions so that Apache could have access to it. Here is what I performed:

sudo chown www-data itdb.db; chmod u+w itdb.db
sudo chmod u+w itdb.db
sudo chown www-data /var/www/itdb/data
sudo chmod u+w /var/www/itdb/data/
sudo chown www-data /var/www/itdb/data/files/
sudo chmod u+w /var/www/itdb/data/files/

Once that was completed I then browsed to http://localhost/itdb within my browser. The web page didn’t load for me due to an error, this is what I got:

Open database Error!: could not find driver

After further research I found I needed to install sqlite and php5-sqlite. I did so with the following command at the terminal:

sudo apt-get install sqlite php5-sqlite

Then restarted Apache with the following command:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Hit refresh on my browser and all was working.

So far, I have been really impressed with IT Items Database. It’s super easy to use and very effective for keeping track of all your devices. I highly recommend it.