Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Upgrade No Sound

After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala my system was without sound. Alsa couldn't find any sound cards.

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such file or directory

aplay -l
aplay: device_list:223: no soundcards found...

After poking around I discovered that the updater did not update /boot/grub/menu.lst to use the latest installed kernel.

You can fix this automatically by running update-grub. Choose install package maintainer's version if you don't have any custom entries.

Printing to PDF from Excel produces blank PDF

I've had a couple of incidents where printing a chart from Excel 2007 to a PDF produces a blank PDF. It happens with Acrobat 8 and 9. This leads me to believe it may be an Office issue, but I've also seen the same file work on one machine and not another with the same versions of Office and Acrobat installed. The only workaround I've found is using the Save As PDF feature instead of the PDF printer.

Windows 7 Slow Network access

I've seen a similar problem on Server 2003 machines a few times, but I've just recently encountered it on a Windows 7 machine. It's always on a machine with a Broadcom 57xx chip, and in this case it was a Dell Precision 690.

The issue is browsing file shares on other machines. File transfers will be very slow, as will just browsing between folders on the share. If you are experiencing network performance issues on Windows 7, try running the following from a cmd prompt with elevated privileges:

netsh interface tcp set global chimney=disabled

Disable Apache and PHP Version on Ubuntu Server

Edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
Add the following lines to the end of apache2.conf

ServerTokens Prod
ServerSignature Off

Edit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
Change expose_php = Off