Default sound device - How do I chose it??

[ArmandoTav]

First of all I want to thank all of you for your kind input on both questions I posted

@sithlord48
Instaled Kmix and replaced KUBUNTU's sound manager with it. Now when I boot I no longer see KUBUNTU's sound manager. I get Kmix.
Reactivated all sound devices and gave the USB phones priority through Kmix. Didn't work. The Mobo's 3.5 Jack still gets the sound send through it.

Had to disable all sound devices to get sound in the USB phones again. Even the GPU HDMI sound seems to have priority over the phones because I can't get sound in the USB phones if I have GPU HDMI sound activated.

Such a simple thing, yet.....


@GreyGeek
A lot changes in 5 to 10 years
I never used Qemu. All my VM experience has been with Oracle's VirtualBox and I think it only allows you to assign 128Mb (max) to the guest GPU. Given the average guest performance under VB I guess they don't expect anyone to run GPU intensive tasks in one.

You should take a serious look at the video I linked in my other post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fggKnvIHzHQ). If you look beyond the gaming, there is some awesome stuff getting done there. The guest performance in that system is mind boggling when you compare it to what we are used to see and work with. In fact, given it's performance while gaming, I'd say it's safe to assume that, that guest is able to run whatever you throw at it (Photoshop, video editing, CAD... etc) almost as well as a metal counterpart would.

Watch the video and tell us what you think about it. Maybe it's time to take another look at Qemu

@wartnose

I'm going for it later tonight and tomorrow but I intend to do it all or nothing. Yesterday I figured out how to add a second monitor to my work space and I'll do this in a dual monitor configuration. To make matters a bit more complicated I'm doing it with different sized and aspect ratio monitors: 22" 16:9 and 17" 4:3. On top of that I have the Linux skills of a chipmunk. Go big or go home

I'll be following this guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-hOr44oBAI

I know it's intended for UBUNTU 15:04 but it's the closest thing I have to work with. Fingers crossed

[GreyGeek]

Hmmm. It took me 29 minutes to download the openSUSE Leap-42.1 DVD but only 10 minutes to install it as a KVM guest and it runs well and fast. It must be hardware dependent? Maybe Virtualbox runs better on your hardware. KVM runs well on mine. I played around with Virtualbox some time ago but I think I would have had to add some proprietary extension pack to be able to do something but I can't remember what I was trying to do.
...
I believe Virtualbox can with guest additions?
...

Hmmm... Indeed! Your connection averages 2.6Mb/s, which is about twice as fast as my average download speed. Thanks TWC.

In past years one had to manually install virualbox-guest-additions.iso in order to get features like full screen, 3D acceleration (and 2D if your hardware supports it), and various ports. Today all one has to do is select the following programs and install them. Everything else is automatic.


On Slashdot I read that LinuxMint released a beta of their Plasma5 offering, LinuxMint KDE 18, codename Sarah. I downloaded the 1.8Gb file and installed it on my newly re-installed VirtualBox.

wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/linuxmint//testing/linuxmint-18-kde-64bit-beta.iso

VB gave me full screen, all ports, bidirectional drag&drop, bidirectional shared directory, very fast. Nice distro. Something to watch. IMO much nicer than openSUSE-Leap-42.1, but openSUSE is a nice distro.

I wouldn't sell KVM short. IBM supports it. Red Hat develops it and I think HP uses it for one of their clouds. I built a server at work a few years back to test virtualization. I used Ubuntu as KVM host and ran a number of Windows machine guests (terminal servers and postgres server). Back then SSDs were high dollar so I used a RAID array of spinning discs and used an SSD for caching (bcache). The setup was pretty fast and stable. Now all our servers are virtual at a hosted site running Xen/Citrix lol.

I do remember I had a problem with KVM and Mint a couple of years ago. Mint ran in software rendering mode. KVM was not able to do 3D video acceleration but that may have changed by now.

With ArmandoTav's hardware, I think KVM would work well, better if he moves to SSD though (or caches to SSD). I want to see if he can get GPU pass through to work.

With his hardware, I agree with you.

I wouldn't sell KVM short, either. The problem I may have had is the confusion about what to install. Just qemu? KVM? Or, qemu-kvm? Or just virt-manager, or a combination of them or all of them? I did all of them. The GUI I ran was virt-manager. Images here. My "test" may have conflicting apps. VirtualBox uses qemu code, but Oracle conceals it with not so "clever" naming and capitalization.

The nice thing about Linux (and obviously Kubuntu) is that Armando can try both and see which one he like!

[sithlord48]

if you look at this screen shot of kmix (the popup you get from it in the system tray will be similar but have them all in one row.)
where you see the programs icon you can rigth click on them to use move to move the sound while being played to another sound device.. (i.e force the playback to your headphones when you want).

https://www.kde.org/images/screenshots/kmix.png

[GreyGeek]

...
@GreyGeek
A lot changes in 5 to 10 years
I never used Qemu. All my VM experience has been with Oracle's VirtualBox and I think it only allows you to assign 128Mb (max) to the guest GPU. Given the average guest performance under VB I guess they don't expect anyone to run GPU intensive tasks in one.

You should take a serious look at the video I linked in my other post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fggKnvIHzHQ). If you look beyond the gaming, there is some awesome stuff getting done there. The guest performance in that system is mind boggling when you compare it to what we are used to see and work with. In fact, given it's performance while gaming, I'd say it's safe to assume that, that guest is able to run whatever you throw at it (Photoshop, video editing, CAD... etc) almost as well as a metal counterpart would.

Watch the video and tell us what you think about it. Maybe it's time to take another look at Qemu

I'm reinstalling just virt-manager and its dependencies. I've installed the Maui Plasma5 distro under VirtualBox, so I'll do the same under Virt-Manager and compare the two.

[wartnose]

I think virt-manager is the gui for qemu-kvm. I think you have to install both along and probably bridge-utils. I found it easier to install through Synaptic. Maui1 runs pretty good as a virtual machine. In fact, I'm pretty impressed.

[GreyGeek]

I think virt-manager is the gui for qemu-kvm. I think you have to install both along and probably bridge-utils. I found it easier to install through Synaptic. Maui1 runs pretty good as a virtual machine. In fact, I'm pretty impressed.

I have to recant my previous statements about virt-manager, qemu and kvm. After ArmandoTav's rebuttal I decided I didn't give virt-manager enough of a checkout, so I went to the docs, and especially the youtube tutorials (I previously saw the video Armando recommended but didn't find it helpful.) I reinstalled just virt-manager and qemu-system, leaving out all the other junk I thought would have been necessary and proceeded to install Maui 1 and openSUSE Leap-41.

My problem was that the standard install route did not include a method to install other disk formats besides qcow2, which isn't compatible with my btrfs fs, because of its COW. However, one of the videos showed how to create the virtual HD first by going through the Edit-->Details route, and use the Storage tab. There I was able to select raw, which resulted in an *.img format which I could set at a FIXED size, which didn't happen when I tried "file" on the normal installation method.

I love the way you can switch to the configuration window WHILE the VM is running, AND, have more than one VM running at the same time, if you have the hardware resources!

After my playing around with Maui and Mint KDE Sarah I deleted VirtualBox from my installation.

Thanks for the patience, Tav and wartnose!

[wartnose]

....Thanks for the patience, Tav and wartnose!

Glad it works. Don't sell yourself either though. I have very little to contribute to this forum. Mostly I just learn from you and others. Anxious to see if Tav got the passthrough working. That seems a bit tedious but probably fun.

[ArmandoTav]

* UPDATE *

KUBUNTU blew up after doing... nothing

I know it's the classic answer every IT guy gets when software 'blows up' on users:
IT Guy (Me) - WOW ...... never saw that before. What did you do it?
Clueless user - Nothing. Honest!!

but... thats the truth. I did NOTHING to it

I was struggling to get dual monitors to work (dedicated GPU-HDMI and iGPU-VGA), and that would be a deal breaker. However I decided I'd plow along with the guide and deal with the dual monitor stuff when I really had to. The guide should take me about 60 minutes if everything went smoothly and the dual monitor stuff had nothing to do with it. It was a generic problem and I'm sure there is a lot of information out there to sort it out.

Friday night I installed some stuff I needed to get the job done (sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin bridge-utils virt-manager)along with CPU Checker. Saturday morning I was checking VMware Player out and decided to install it too to take a look at it a later time.
The system looked nice and stable and I used it for a while to read some stuff online.

I had a REALLY busy weekend and only yesterday late afternoon I had the time to start working on the GPU pass through thing. First thing on the 'to do' list: Enable VT in the MB BIOS. Restarted from a fully working and updated KUBUNTU, went to BIOS, enabled VT, saved and rebooted into a frozen KUBUNTU (locked at the glowing KUBUNTU logo... but NOT glowing. Frozen.).

Gave the system over 10 minutes to sort itself out but it was apparently doing nothing.
Hard reset. Same result.
Went into BIOS again and disabled VT. Being the last thing I did, maybe it had something to do with it (even if it made no sense). Same result. Frozen at the boot up KUBUNTU logo.

Right now the only way out I see is to reinstall KUBUNTU but the struggle I had with it since minute 1, and now this, is making me pull away from it to be honest. The constant App crashes before I updated PLASMA and the unsolvable sound device problem... I love how it looks and feels but is that worth the hassle? It's like loving a beautiful woman that brings you nothing but trouble and headache

I want to change to Linux and I have to go through the GPU pass through stuff to do it. I don't need simple stuff like changing a default sound device (just an example) to be in my way at this point. I guess I have to reevaluate my options.

[wizard10000]

...KUBUNTU blew up after doing... nothing

There are no coincidences in information technology; every undesirable effect has a root cause

Reinstalling is probably not necessary; booting up in rescue mode and reverting the last changes you made has a reasonably high probability of success; this would mean uninstalling the kvm tools you installed or at the very least blacklisting kvm and kvm_intel.

Hope this helps -

edit: The 4.4 kernel that ships with *buntu 16.04 has at least partial Skylake support; Canonical backported some 4.5 and 4.6 patches into the 4.4 kernel but once I got the machine to boot I'd be looking for a later kernel and better Skylake support.

[ArmandoTav]

There are no coincidences in information technology; every undesirable effect has a root cause

Hey wizard10000, thx for answering

True . You are either able to pin point it or you're not. But it's there. We all know it.

Just a question: Wouldn't blacklisting kvm and kvm_intel stop me from doing what I intend to?

At this point in time (the system is days old and I have nothing there), even though it's not a solution I'd often resort to, it's probably faster to just reinstall. I don't want to be 'that' guy that looks for the easy way out but my time, with regular work, part-time, wife and kids, is limited.

[wizard10000]

Hey wizard10000, thx for answering

True . You are either able to pin point it or you're not. But it's there. We all know it.

Just a question: Wouldn't blacklisting kvm and kvm_intel stop me from doing what I intend to?

At this point in time (the system is days old and I have nothing there), even though it's not a solution I'd often resort to, it's probably faster to just reinstall. I don't want to be 'that' guy that looks for the easy way out but my time, with regular work, part-time, wife and kids, is limited.

I think it's worth a try. Another option would be to just uninstall the KVM packages you've installed - you should be able to do that in grub rescue mode.

[GreyGeek]

This is why I love btrfs. I have @_bkup(date) and #home_bkup(date) standing by on my /dev/sda1 just in case. After a major update that by testing proves good I delete the old bkups, and move @ to @_bakcup(newdate) and @home to @home_backup(newdate). If an unrecoverable disaster comes I boot a liveusb on which I have btrfs, mount my hd, revert the changes and make sure fstab is point to the right uuids.
PS- in the two years I've been running btrfs I have never had to utilize this recovery technique. And, Btrfs has been faultless for me.

[GreyGeek]

As this thread appears to be drawing to a close I MUST say that I've been exploring qemu/kvm/virt-manager/qemu-syystem and find it to be fantastic. It makes VirtualBox look like a toy surrounded by a beautiful wall (which restricts the user a lot).

Want to start a guest OS? use virsh and enter
start guestname

Is it running but needs to be rebooted?
reboot guestname

Assuming the guestos has sssh installed, remotely log in.
First, get the guuestos ip mac address
domiflist guestos

With that mac address, in a console, use arp
arp -e | grep macaddress
which returns the ipaddress

Now, us ssh
ssh yourdominname@guestosipaddress -l accountname
Enter the password and you are in.

Awesome. Start another guestos and ssh into it from a previous guestos. The possibilities seem endless.

Thanks ArmandoTav and wartnose!

[ArmandoTav]

@GreyGeek

Don't mention it

Tbh I didn't know what you'd find. I just pointed out 5 to 10 year is a loooooog time . A (frigin) lot changes in computer science in 1 year. Imagine 5 to 10.

- ...uninstalling the kvm tools you installed or at the very least blacklisting kvm and kvm_intel.

If I can't set up a stable GPU pass through I wont be able to make the trade to Linux. Not at this point. Doesn't blacklisting KVM prevent me from setting up a VM with pass through?

edit: The 4.4 kernel that ships with *buntu 16.04 has at least partial Skylake support; Canonical backported some 4.5 and 4.6 patches into the 4.4 kernel but once I got the machine to boot I'd be looking for a later kernel and better Skylake support.

I went ahead and installed UBUNTU 16.04 to give that Kernel thing a little test. Ugly as it may look it is way (WAAAAY!!) more stable then KUBUNTU (at least in my machine). Oh.... and I could easily change my default sound device

Went into the guide as far as GPU blacklisting, wich btw I wasn't able to do but that's not the point. Point is UBUNTU didn't complain about anything and they have the same kernel. So maybe isn't kernel related? I dunno...

Anyway the point of the testing wasn't about changing to UBUNTU. I just wanted to test the kernel+the GPU pass through implementation. I will change it back to KUBUNTU.

Funny thing happened though: Installed UBUNTU with a dual monitor set up and it worked really well right off the bat. To my surprise it was working even during OS installation. Updated UBUNTU and iGPU monitor was lost. So... yeah

I bet this isn’t popular arround here but I’ll go ahead and say it anyway (the friends I trust the most are the ones that tell me all the stuff I don’t like to ear but I need to): Got dual monitor to work in W10, in the same machine, with the same setup (iGPU+GPU) in a couple of minutes and has been working flawlessly ever since. We can hate it all we want (I do) but it just works.

I’ll install KUBUNTU 16.04 again later this week and look into updating the kernel first. Only then I’ll dive into the GPU pass through thing and give it a make or break attempt. If it doesn't work I'll have to wait a bit longer to make the change. I'm sure that sooner or later some one will build an integrated point and click tool to do it. Kinda surprised no one did this far. GPU pass through would be a HUGE DEAL. Trust me.

be back later this week with an update on this.

cheers

[GreyGeek]

.....
I bet this isn’t popular arround here but I’ll go ahead and say it anyway (the friends I trust the most are the ones that tell me all the stuff I don’t like to hear but I need to) ....

Not at all, ArmandoTav! There is a huge difference between a baseless rant (usually by a drive-by shooter) and an informed critical opinion, which is what your's is. The best help is an info-laden post to https://bugs.kde.org/, which not everyone knows how to do.