Ubuntu: Restart sound services

Ubuntu 18.04 uses systemd to manage services.

There are basically two commands for listing all services and manipulating the state of a certain service: service and systemctl:

• service manages System V init scripts
• systemctl control...

My front audio output would not work even though the front mic input did fine.
The Pulse Audio mixer (= Ubuntu default) does not offer any complex controls to fix the issue. Instead, run gamix (be prepared for a GUI blast) and switch "Independen...

There are some frontends available, but they all suck, are no longer maintained or are hard to install.

As a surprisingly comfortable alternative I have found a command line tool s3cmd:

sudo apt-get install s3cmd

When you run s3cmd ...

Usually, the logrotate service takes care of renaming log files each night or so to avoid logs becoming huge. That will rename your.log to your.log.1, the next time to your.log.2.gz, etc. Here is how to make that happen out of band (you sh...

If others on a call (Skype, SIP, ...) can not hear you loud enough, your volume levels are probably too low. Also, Skype may be changing your mixer levels.

Set a proper recording volume

1. Open your mixer software (run pavucontrol).
2. Switc...

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If you want to have an English Ubuntu UI, but still see dates, money amounts, paper formats, etc. in German formats, you can fine-tune your /etc/default/locale like this:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.U...

I have a pair of headphones connected to my desktop's back panel and a headset connected to the front panel. I used to play sound over both outputs, but this suddenly stopped working this week.

Apparently, (perhaps through some update) "jack sens...

Sometimes you need to restart the Gnome panel, e.g. when you installed a new Gnome panel widget but the widget list was cached before.

You often don't want to do sign out and back in for this.
Instead, just run:

killall gnome-panel

This ...

Ubuntu is phasing out the notification area (a.k.a. “system tray”), because of its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior. Many programs that previously used the notification area should use other notification...