Making Ubuntu default to using the USB sound card

The nVidia video card in my machine also gets registered as a sound card. There appears to be a high definition audio (HDA) chip on it that gets automatically detected and made default.

To get sound through my USB sound card, I’ve had to add the following to /etc/udev/rules.d/00_local.rules:

# Default to using additional (USB) sound cards when they are available.
KERNEL==”pcmC[D0-9cp]*”, ACTION==”add”, PROGRAM=”/bin/sh -c ‘K=%k; K=$${K#pcmC}; K=$${K%%D*}; echo defaults.ctl.card $$K > /etc/asound.conf; echo defaults.pcm.card $$K >>/etc/asound.conf'”
KERNEL==”pcmC[D0-9cp]*”, ACTION==”remove”, PROGRAM=”/bin/sh -c ‘echo defaults.ctl.card 0 > /etc/asound.conf; echo defaults.pcm.card 0 >>/etc/asound.conf'” 

Any new applications that launch will default to using the USB sound card.

Why can’t anything be simple?

Lubuntu touchpad configuration

While minimalism is good, too much minimalism can be a real drag. Lubuntu doesn’t come with a touch pad configuration app, so you’ll have to work with the command line.

To get an idea of the options you can configure, run the following command: 

synclient -l

Edge scrolling and two finger scrolling is enabled by default. This is overkill on my laptop, and edge scrolling is especially troublesome as my touchpad is tiny. I noticed that the mouse cursor was jumping all over the place while I’m typing. After a little digging, it turns out that this is because palm detection is disabled by default and thus the touchpad is responding to my palm. 

We fix this by running the following command in the terminal:

synclient PalmDetect=1 VertEdgeScroll=0

To persist these settings across restarts, edit the autostart configuration file by issuing the following command:

gksudo leafpad /etc/xdg/lxsession/Lubuntu/autostart

Add the following line to the end of the file:

@synclient PalmDetect=1 VertEdgeScroll=0

And we’re done. Sit back and enjoy your newly configured sensible touchpad behaviour.