I am looking for a wee bit of help.
Over the past year or two, I’ve installed various linux distributions, played with them briefly and uninstalled them. Usually I’ve given up at the point I’ve tried to get a wifi card to work.
A couple of months ago I had a partitioning accident on my pc laptop losing all my windows stuff. As I don’t have disks for the machine I decided to install Ubuntu and have a play. Ubuntu installed easily and picked up my wifi card straight away, I didn’t really do much except browse the web a bit and check out a few apps. Ubuntu looked as if is pretty straighforward for basic office and web tools.
A bit later when I was getting ready to go to Be Very afraid I though it might be a good idea to have a second laptop in case the iBook had a problem. In the event it would have been helpful to have another machine with us.
So I dug out the pc and set about installing Audacity. I’ve installed Audacity a few times on macs and pcs and never had any bother. At the time it wasn’t available in the Add/Remove programs list in ubuntu so I downloaded a package and tried to install that. This told me that various files were needed and not on the machine so it was off to google to download some more stuff. eventually I got audacity installed and plugged in my mic for a quick test: nothing. A quick trip to the sound control panel didn’t make much sense to me.
Googling lead me to this sort of thing and this: USB mic on Linux – Audacity Wiki.
Not the most user friendly of instructions for those of us shy of shell commands.
A month later and I am trying again, updateed ubuntuOne suggestion was to download the latest version of audacity and build it. I’ve done this a few times on my mac from the commandline without bother, but attempting this in ubuntu lead to messages about not finding a compiler…
For this to work for busy teachers it has got to be a bit easier. Having said that I’d like to use the pc, and a lot of ubuntu looks nice, so if anyone knows of a simple way to get a usb mike working let me know. I can manage a few shell commands on my mac, but no more than a few at one time.