Month: June 2023

For the longest time, there was no “settings app” available for this webcam under Windows, reason for this is, that is – as the name indicates – this specific model has been certified for use with the Cisco Conference Systems and Skype. While this particular model can be used with other video conferencing programs like Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Discord, etc – anything that isn’t Cisco or Skype will result in a short flash of the picture every couple of minutes, it is not really disturbing much and only visible for a fraction of a second, but it is not certified for their use.

In 2022, The Logitech Webcam Settings App has been updated to support the C920-C!

Unfortunately earlier this year, they removed the Webcam Settings App from the download page of the C920-C and replaced it with their new universal webcam app “LogiTune”, despite it being listed in its recent release to be officially supporting the C920-C, it is not detected by LogiTune at all!

Luckily, if you check the “more” section, of the business webcam C920e, it is still available for download and can be used to setup your C920-C as well, while Logitech (hopefully?) works on releasing a fixed version of LogiTune.

If you want to check with Logitech on the status of my bug report with them, you may refer to Ticket Number : 11130729 with their tech support department.

Since 2008, I am using the this soundcard in my desktop pc. Despite Creative Labs planned to EOL the product with release of Windows 8 in 2012, i.e. even before its release, they originally planned to never fix the dolby surround bug they had in their Windows 7 drivers back in 2010 (I found the bug in 2009 and reported it to them). Despite that, they even released updates for Windows 10 build #1903 in 2019

However with the release of Windows 11, Creative Labs finally put the card to rest and since even Daniel K. gave up on it (Final updates for my Support Packs and farewell), I was lucky that upgrading Windows 10 to Windows 11 just made the soundcard keep working, however occasionally, the driver would crash and require a reboot, and even in rare occasions, a workaround was necessary (spoiler alert: it still is, I just tried it out for this post).

Thanks to the free tool DriverMax I found that there is a modified driver for X-Fi cards that even run more stable than the official Windows 8.x-10 drivers, i.e. without the occasional crashing. It finds a driver version 6.0.1.1285 dated 24th of January 2021 by Auzentech and signature by Riolin Limited (Auzentech was a Korean computer hardware manufacturer that specialized in high-definition audio equipment and in particular PC sound cards and which went defunct in 2014).

It turns out Riolin Limited fixed the driver’s stability issues, by removing the “What U Hear” feature, means you cannot anymore record what you hear through the soundcard. However I decided to keep using it, as I prefer a more stable driver than having more features.

If you need the “What U Hear” feature, I suggest getting the headphone DAC / USB Soundcard Creative Sound Blaster Play! 3 which does provide this feature, plus is one of the few USB soundcards still offering an analog line in port (No, Mic and Line-In are not the same!).

You may thank me later! 🙂

For many many years, it annoyed me to the most, that my laser printer DELL C1765nfw which I bought in 2014 would not work in Linux at all, I never found a driver it works, and even if you find one and install the cups package, it will not work in many cases, if you don’t do the setup process exactly as I describe it here.

I found out that there is a working printer driver available now via OpenPrinting

first open the printer settings program
Install it with the command line:

sudo dnf install cups-drivers-foo2hbpl

Then add the new printer using “Network printer” —> “Find network” printer and enter its IP, for me it is 192.168.1.60:

it finds the printer at port 9100 using for a connection the AppSocket/HPJetDirect.

Then select “Select printer from database” and use the Dell C1765

Then it is found and the Describe printer dialog fields are pre-defined correctly.

When it asks whether you want to print a test page, decline as first we need to setup the driver to allow printing in color, as per default it is setup to print in b/w only.

Change color mode from “Monochrome” to Color:

Once changes are applied, you can happily print a test page.

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As for the USB floppy disk drivers, it makes me mad that it constantly probes for whether a disk has been inserted, so it constantly lids up and clicks.

While searching for a way how to read SMART data from disks, I came across this article: How to Test SSD/HDD Health in Linux 1

Its suggested GUI tool “Gnome Disks” has a button on top called “Power Off”.

Silence!

Thanks to the OpenMandriva community who gave me a helping hand and for the printer issue pointing me in the right direction after I plead for help.