A52 (AC3) Alsa Output broke in Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneric)

It appears that changes to libav have broke alsa ac3 encoding. Below details a patch to fix the issue.

http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-plugins.git;a=blobdiff;f=a52/pcm_a52.c;h=76f21cd003bfcfb8c3b07e003f04aca6132a7b79;hp=ed491b31c32a87a65258524b497d05d6e876fc0b;hb=40c129a160f37fe9488b2828d6299f99c269703e;hpb=06ca71522f1dc48b8503d945da81fdbcbab0aafa

After implementing the patch and recompiling libasound_module_pcm_a52.so I have AC3 output once more

Update

A new libasound-plugins package is currently in oneiric proposed with the above patch included.

Remove Old Package Configuration Files in Ubuntu

Original article

dpkg -l | awk '/^rc/{ print $2}' | sudo xargs dpkg --purge

Disable ~/.xsession-errors in (K)Ubuntu

Sick of having  ~/.xsession-errors filling your disk? Want a 'clean' way to disable XSession logging? I Came across this mailing list entry. There's a slight change required to use this under Kubuntu in that Xsession.d is located in /etc/X11 not /etc/. I simply created a file called /etc/X11/Xsession.d/05-noerrfile containing:

# This is a -*- shell-script -*- fragment called by /etc/X11/Xsession

# Redirect all errors to /dev/null instead of $ERRFILE
# (~/.xsession-errors by default), to avoid filling up users home
# directory with error messages.  Allow the user to disable this by
# creating ~/.xsession-errors-enable

if [ ! -f "$HOME/.xsession-errors-enable" ] ; then
  # Report the change to the log file before switching
  echo "info: Redirecting xsession messages to /dev/null."
  echo "info: touch '$HOME/.xsession-errors-enable' to disable this."
  exec >> /dev/null 2>&1
fi