Comments on: Ubuntu 6.06 Long Term Review

By: Riyad Kalla

Riyad Kalla — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 14:28:59 +0000

Brian,
I know what you mean. I have noticed a surge in “iPod” development for both Rythmox and Banshee on the Planet Gnome site in the last few weeks, but I’m hesitent to say “so it will be fixed soon”… I’ve been saying that since RedHat 5.0, and it’s still not a plug-and-play experience… so I’ll just say “Until companies start investing time and money into the platform like ATI/nVidia have done with their drivers, we are not going to see plug-and-play experiences on Linux with newer mainstream proprietary devices”

Doh

By: Brian Harkness

Brian Harkness — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 13:50:04 +0000

Wow, after tinkering with Kubuntu the first time, I did get Amarok to play iTunes AAC, but I did something stupid and messed up my ability to sudo, so I just reinstalled and overwrote the original install. No dice now for playing AAC now. For some reason, installing some of the gstreamer bad multiverse crap “breaks” so even though Amarok 1.4.3 is SUPPOSED to take care of AAC (m4a), it doesn’t really seem native, and I can’t get it to work. It reads the files just fine, it just won’t play them (says something about no code or codec for m4a format). And I never ever got wmv files to play. Linux is great for just doing office tasks, web browsing, but for multimedia, to quote from above, it a “f**king stupid nightmare” and it doesn’t just work well, if at all. The general masses won’t figure it out, and although I have seen a lot of negative blogs about iTunes format of AAC, the harsh reality is that it is out there, and now common, so until that “Just works” off the install of the program itself, or at least with the install of a player without additional tweaking, I would caution anyone of getting rid of their Windows installation… I hope I still have:-) Thanks friend, you are dead on with your blog.

By: Riyad Kalla

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 19:43:50 +0000

Jimmy great tip, I wasn’t even aware of that package. Thanks!

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 19:27:36 +0000

Just a tip: Instead of editing “flashplayer-installer”, you can install “linux32″ from ubuntu repositories. It works as a wrapper to trick the script that it is on a 32-bit system. just execute
linux32 ./flashplayer-installer
and it will not complain at all.

By: pranith

pranith — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:28:48 +0000

sorry, this is the site

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Dapper

this site would have got ur totem up and running within 5 min.

By: pranith

pranith — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:25:41 +0000

ubuntuguide.org/dapper

this site would have got ur totem up and running within 5 min.

By: » Linux Hardware on Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake)

» Linux Hardware on Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:57:45 +0000

[...] A while ago I blogged about my experience installing Ubuntu and configuring/using it to replace my Windows desktop. Then using that information I put together a guide for new users on what to expect when setting up Ubuntu and how to create the best “first timer” experience I could think of. [...]

By: Riyad Kalla

Riyad Kalla — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 14:31:51 +0000

Chris,
Thank you for the very detailed followup for the folks in 64-bit land, excellent reference.

Let’s hope that the 64-bit work is included in the Flash 9 player on Linux… who knows.

By: Chris Montgomery

Chris Montgomery — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 08:13:10 +0000

Forgot to mention when you open a movie with mplayer in firefox etc.
right click on the window and set your configuration options, video output is important. and some people have experienced just a black screen and audio if not setup at all.

By: Chris Montgomery

Chris Montgomery — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 08:05:12 +0000

Ok i’ll cover the flash 64 bit plugin issue,for the umpteenth time.
I’ve even sent macromedia a e-mail about it and how to solve it.
As a temporary measure till someone gets off their ass and does a compile.
Oh at the same time compile flash 8 and might as well cover i386 and 64 bit versions while your at it guys/gals.
Hoping someone important at macromedia is reading.
But i guess they had no time to post it for the linux users, well until MS has them in a crushing deathgrip… anyway here is what to do.
Download the flashpplayer 7 from macromedia’s site
“install_flash_player_7_linux.tar.gz” extract file to temporary directory.
open the file “flashplayer-installer” in your favorite text editor.
now go to the section that has the system architecture checks “about line 232″ in the main section this is where the problem is and all we need to do is tell the installer what to do, the easy way for the end user is to have the installer not to check at all by commenting out the section

# check architecture
By placing a pound character at the start of each line so it looks like this.

# check architecture
#TEMPARCH=`uname -m`
#case $TEMPARCH in
# i[3456]86)
# ARCH=i386
# ;;
# *)
# exit_cpu $TEMPARCH
# ;;
#esac

As for the other way it’s just inserting the X86_64 flags in the section as a way for macromedia to release a installer that will work in either arch type.
or anyone else that might want to package it for their own systems.
And i have posted that process in other forums so google for it. i’ll get it up on my website sometime soon when i get a chance to get the linux tips pages finished and the wiki up.

And i run fedora 4 and have no problems with apple trailers site.
ya there are plugins you need (same in windows i’m sure) it’s just some companies dont make them easily available or easy to install (macromedia) (apple) take a hint. I mean quicktime for Freebsd, linux, and varients must be as hard to compile as it is for OSX.

I’m new to playing with ubuntu and dont have it handy (it’s at the office)
to try apple trailers site.but mine works fine in fedora with mplayer and all plugins you can get for it and also make sure you have mplayer quicktime plugin. This site relates to fedora 4 “http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_4_installation_notes.html#MPlayer”
but i’m sure can be used as a guide to getting mplayer complete and plugins in place.

By: The “Break it Down” Blog » Blog Archive » A Manual for the Ubuntu Linux Beginner

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 21:03:03 +0000

[...] I hope this general Ubuntu started guide has proven to be helpful to any non-Linux users that aren’t sure about Linux yet but want to give it a try. If you’d like more information about more advanced topics like getting your iPod working and what using Ubuntu Linux as a primary desktop is like for a week along with all the quirks I discovered and solutions (at the end). [...]

By: The “Break it Down” Blog » Blog Archive » Get iPod podcast synchronization working on Ubuntu 6.06

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 01:20:04 +0000

[...] The “Break it Down” Blog Simplifying information on technology, cars and more. « Ubuntu 6.06 Long Term Review [...]

By: Cemo

Cemo — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 12:49:05 +0000

hi,
this should be the classic case of no sound on Flash

(assuming that you have installed alsa-oss):

then

sudo gedit /etc/firefox/firefoxrc

Find the line with FIREFOX_DSP and replace it to:
Quote:
FIREFOX_DSP=”aoss”

C.Koc

By: Riyad Kalla

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 01:28:04 +0000

K, this is a distinction I never made. I always tended to go with the “most popular” distrobutions, mostly the ones that were in the news the most (RedHat back in the day, then Gentoo, then Fedora, then Ubuntu shortly there after and now SLED).

I didn’t want to be behind the curve in functionality so I’ve never tried Mepis or the other two you mentioned. Are these development teams sufficiently big to support a large user community like Ubuntu or SUSE?

By: Riyad Kalla

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 01:26:19 +0000

I’m not sure how I missed Automatix so absolutely and completely. I was on Ubuntuforums.org the entire time I was on Ubuntu looking up how to install these things and *never* saw anyone mention it.

Is the Automatix work going to get integrated at some point? I finally found the page and bookmarked it.

By: K

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 23:26:57 +0000

If you really want to find a distro that “just works”, it would be smart to look into distros that don’t have issues with coming with proprietary packages already installed. I personally use Mepis and love it – the only thing you really have to install via the repositories *for obvious reasons* is libdvdcss. To my understanding Ultima and Freespire are two more distros that come with proprietary packages on their discs.

By: Guillaume Theoret

Guillaume Theoret — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 20:22:12 +0000

Like Paul said, you shouldn’t have been trying to install all these audio and video codecs manually. Automatix handles it beautifully. It’ll also install any pdf viewers you need, java, wine and all kinds of other useful stuff that isn’t already automatic.

By: Riyad Kalla

Riyad Kalla — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 20:05:59 +0000

Paul: Great followup. I’ll dig into Automatix, thanks for the tip.

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 20:02:18 +0000

Here’s some help for your complaints, most of them are easily fixable:

* Message->Apply Filters in Evolution, make sure to Select all first by pressing Ctrl-A

* Install Automatix (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=177646), it will fix all your music / movie playing problems with the exception of the encrypted AAC problem. MPlayer is usually better for the Mozilla plugin though.

* Download Amarok 1.4 and make sure you have a PC-formatted iPod, it works like gangbusters.

By: Riyad Kalla

Riyad Kalla — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 19:27:44 +0000

Kallahan: Is this because sites are moving to Flash 9 or you are saying in general the 32-bit build is still messed up?

By: Riyad Kalla

Riyad Kalla — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 19:27:14 +0000

Mike: From a usability stand point they aren’t the same thing. The problem with Windows is finding drivers then running an installer to install it. With Linux is going nuts with xmodmap and sending DBUS events to running processes. But I’m not a hopeless Windows fan either, if I were I wouldn’t be doing these reviews. Just trying to give folks what I would call a really middle gound review of what it’s like to move to these desktops. You sound like a technical guy and can avoid the mistakes I made so your experience could very well be excellent. I wish you luck and if you want to come back and share the experience that would be much appreciated.

By: Kallahan

Kallahan — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 19:03:29 +0000

Don’t worry about flash not working in 64 bit, it doesn’t work in the 32 bit releases either, there is video but no audio.

By: Mike ZIllion

Mike ZIllion — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 18:41:31 +0000

So your first week with Windows XP (or any other operating system, for that matter) wasn’t similarly frustrating? Switching is the hard part. What you switch to is a separate issue. Your review convinced me to try a switch, because you addressed my main concern: will it do everything I want it to do once I’m up to speed. Sounds like it will. And it won’t be compromised by reliance on the complex and fragile commercial software industry.