yes, i ripped it off of joel

Recently, after a few days of uptime, my sound would completely go out on my laptop with the only thing fixing it being a complete restart of the machine. I originally tried:

sudo /etc/init.d/pulseaudio restart

This did not work at all, so I resigned myself to just restart the machine when it happened. With a solid state disk, rebooting takes 30 seconds, so it was not a major pain. But the sound went out again today after only about 2 days, so I decided to see if I could fix things. I decided to run VLC on an audio file from the terminal to induce some error messages. After playing the song for a few seconds, the terminal began to be flooded with messages like:

[0xdf11a0] pulse audio output error: overflow

Aha, it was in fact a pulseaudio problem. So, the following steps fixed my problem.

In a terminal:

sudo killall pulseaudio

Then, Alt+F2, enter pulseaudio in the box, click Run, and boom sound was back in action.

Hope this helps someone.

I just received my new Thinkpad W520 laptop and the least I can say is, wow, its amazing…

• Intel Core i7-2820QM Processor (2.30GHz, 8MB L3)
• Dual boot Ubuntu 11.04 64/Windows 7 Professional 64
• 15.6″ FHD (1920 x 1080) LED Backlit Anti-Glare Display
• NVIDIA Quadro 2000M Graphics with 2GB DDR3 Memory
• 16 GB PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHz SODIMM Memory
• UltraNav with TrackPoint & touchpad plus Fingerprint reader
• 720p Camera
• 750 GB Primary Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm
• 1 TB Secondary Hard Disk Drive, 5400rpm
• DVD recordable multiburner
• Express Card Slot & 4 in 1 Card Reader
• 9 cell Li-Ion Battery – 55++
• Bluetooth 3.0
• Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (3×3 AGN)
• 2 USB 3.0 ports
• 1 USB/eSATA
• 1 Powered USB
• Dual digital microphone
• ThinkPad Mini Dock Plus Series 3

I’ve had a blast with this thing so far, and can’t wait to dig into it more. It boots up quicker than you can believe and runs several virtual machines simultaneously with no issues at all. I plan on putting in an Intel 310 Soda Creek PCI-E SSD as soon as they get in stock on Newegg to even juice the performance a bit further. There are only two things I dislike about it thus far: 1. the size of the power adapter, its literally 3x the size of the 90W adapter that came with my T500, but that’s understandable I guess for a 170W adapter 2. The speakers are unusually quiet at full volume, even headphones are quieter than I would have thought them to be.