Karmic annoyance

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One of my pet hates about dist upgrades is the unknown that sits on the other side of the upgrade, especially when using binary drivers. To be honest, dist-upgrade is very usable these days. I usually only have to reconfigure x to use binary drivers after a dist-upgrade these days, whereas it did render the system inoperable in the past.

With my latest upgrade from jaunty jackalope to karmic koala (Ubuntu release names) I only experienced one VERY annoying issue. My speakers were constantly crackling, it was as if they were repeatedly initializing. Even when I plugged in headphones, both the speakers and the headphones were crackling. Adjusting the volume helped some as the crackling got muted, but did not stop the issue.

The solution as it turned out was to disable the power saver option for my sound card. I simply commented out the last line of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf so it became;

# Power down HDA controllers after 10 idle seconds
#options snd-hda-intel power_save=8 power_save_controller=N
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