Getting DVDs to play

Changes since the last post: New laptop - Dell XPS Now using Ubuntu 12.04 Getting DVDs to play - used this link.

BT Homehub screws up networking

A BT homehub firmware upgrade stopped both the wireless and wired connections working on my laptop.

Wireless has been retrieved by acquiring a USB wireless thingummy which uses n wireless stuff. This just works.

Wired can be fixed by following the instructions in this post and setting an IP address for the connection to use...

right click on network manager in the notification area at the top and click on 'Edit Connections'

Click on the Wireless or Wired tab as appropriate, click on the connection you want and click on Edit

Under IPv4 settings click Add to enter this information:

IP Address - 192.168.1.xx (last 2/3 digits any available address on your network)

Subnet Mask 255.255.255.0

Gateway - 192.168.1.254

DNS Server - 192.168.1.254.

Now up to 11.04

Smooth upgrade to 11.04

Issues:

• Ongoing conflict between broadcom drivers for wireless and ethernet card mean neither is working



• Can't have more than 3 windows maximised at any one time - next window appears blank.

Fix for getting notifications of thunderbird messages in the top right messages area.

After some more research figured it out what I needed to do.

Edit or add a file in usr/share/indicators/messages/applications/

I choose to edit a current file since I wanted evolution to not be there.

Opened file usr/share/indicators/messages/applications/evolution

Changed the line usr/share/applications/evolution.desktop to usr/share/applications/thunderbird.desktop (paths may vary depending on what you're trying to launch)

Save file and renamed it to thunderbird (remember I only renamed because I choose to edit the evolution file).

Logout or restart. ( I restarted, but I imagine logging out would give the same result)

The indicator dropdown should now only have what you want in it.

Cheers.

From - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1750374

Stuttering DVD

Laptop now upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 (maverick meerkat)

DVD playback stuttering.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1605401&highlight=dvd+stuttering&page=2
post 20 -

To change the settings, run "gstreamer-properties", click the Video tab
and change the appropriate settings.

You may have set "ximagesink" ("X Window System (No Xv)") as video-output.
This means, that your cpu is doing all the work. Change it to "xvimagesink"
("X Window System (X11/XShm/Xv)") in order to let your graphics card do the work.

This didn't really do anything. My setting was 'default'

Next Post...

http://ubuntu-ky.ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9961868&postcount=29

Re: Choppy video in Maverick
Found a solution on this thread and it seams to have fixed the problem for me.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1588889

In the terminal open the /etc/pulse/default.pa file

Code:

Sudo gedit /etc/pulse/default.pa

In the text file search for the line below:

Code:

load-module module-udev-detect

edit the line to add 'tsched=0' to the end of the line like below:

Code:

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

Save and reboot

What actually worked

System>Preferences>Appearance - No desktop effects

Skype

Skype was having video problems.
Video was transmitting with no problem, but I could only see a white rectangle.

Problem was a conflict with Cairo-dock. This needs to be run in non-GL mode.
System/Preferences/Start-up programmes.
Edit the command for Cairo dock from cairo-dock -o to cairo-dock -c.

Now it works fine.

Upgrade from Karmic to Lucid

Fairly painless upgrade. Basically it all just worked, including wireless settings. Very impressive.

First problem - Mozilla Sunbird was classed as obsolete and removed. This meant I had no access to my todo list. On the other hand, when I installed Lightning into Thunderbird, it found the todo list I had lost access to last month on the last upgrade when Lightning was made incompatible with the version of Thunderbird I had. I store calendars online using Google, but there doesn't seem to be a todo list option there so the list has to be stored locally.

Solution - download Sunbird from the Mozilla website.
- this picked up my previous profile
- export the calendar with the todo list embedded
- open lightning and import the .ics file, into the offline calendar.

Future proof - export Lightning profile when backing up.

Email scanning

Having installed ClamAV and ClamTK, I was disappointed they don't provide email scanning for Thunderbird.

Installing the clamdrib extension for Thunderbird and following the instructions here mean that every email that is previewed or opened gets scanned. Note - incoming emails don't get checked until you try and open them.

Not perfect, but better than nothing.

Rhythmbox

So it turns out that Rhythmbox stores its files here:

~\.local\share\rhythmbox

I have my playlists back again!

Rebuild to install Ubuntu 9.10

This all went very smoothly.
First - completed a backup of the entire home directory (including all hidden files/folders) onto our new external hard drive.

Repartitioned to separate \ and \home. Given \ 50GB and \home about 100GB I think. This will make future upgrades/rebuilds easier I hope.

Fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10. using the dvd from Linux Format 127
Used cable to connect to network to get updates, including the Broadcom wireless driver. This didn't work 6 months ago, but does now. Other hardware driver used is the recommended NVidia one.

Copied home directory back - omitting most hidden files to start with. Need to copy .mozilla and .mozilla-thunderbird to get back firefox and thunderbird settings. Also in .gnome2 the folder for fspot was copied (no need to retag photos!) and a couple of others.

Used solutions from previous posts to sort out correct sound output to headphone jack, installation of flock browser.

Installed Cairo/glx dock and the compiz settings manager. Tweaked desktop settings to make it look pretty.

Getting the speakers to work on the new laptop

So I got a new laptop - an HP Pavilion tx 2000.
It dual boots Windows Vista and Ubuntu 9.04

As with many other people, while basic functionality is there, most of the special buttons don't do what they are meant to.

I'll come back to that as I get round to fixing it (I'm fairly certain that most issues can be resolved with a bit of googling).

Wireless - needed to use ndiswrapper. Much better wireless speeds than my old laptop.

Speakers - while sound worked fairly well through the computer's built-in speakers, I have a rather nice set of speakers that need to be plugged into the headphone socket. This link put me on the right track, but had the wrong (presumably out of date for this version of Ubuntu) file to edit.

For my system editing sound options in /ect/modprobe.d/alsa-base was unsuccessful, since this created a new file.

Instead use this link where the file to amend is correctly given as /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

My sound chipset is ALC861VD and the option I ended up using was the hp one.

Can't hear anything

So, all of a sudden I couldn't play music using Rhythmbox. It would open, I would click on a song and it would say it was playing, but nothing happened. The track clock stayed at zero.

Thanks to this link on the ubuntu forums, I think I have it sorted.

System->Preferences->Sound and changed all the options to ALSA. This has resulted in being able to hear music at the same time as being on the internet etc. Tracks take a couple of seconds longer to start than I am used to, but I'll monitor it for a bit and maybe look at a couple of other steps when I am not busy.

Fonts

Quick way to install a font for use in OpenOffice:

Copy the file to .fonts folder in home directory.

Close OO and reopen.

For more options see here

Flocking marvellous

Just installed Flock 2.0 beta 2. No problems except it didn't pick up my flash plugin.

Thanks to this forum page, I did the following and all now works:

go to ~/.flock and
ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins plugins

Edited March 2010 to add...
useful thing in firefox when working out where the plugins are
about:plugins

Also - how to sort out a launcher...
gedit \home\usrname\Flock.desktop

Put this text in it:
[Desktop Entry]
Version=2.5
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Flock
Comment=Flock Web Browser
Exec="/home/yourusername/flock/flock-browser"
GenericName=Flock Web Browser
Icon=/home/yourusername/flock/icons/mozicon128.png
Path=$HOME/flock
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=
Categories=Network;Application;
GenericName[en_US]=Flock Web Browser

Multiple kernels in GRUB

How to limit the number of kernels appearing in the bootloader:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=818177

I used the first option.

Upgrade to Hardy Heron

With my essays for the year out of the way, it then became time to upgrade to Hardy Heron. Since the previous upgrade went so smoothly, I decided to do another upgrade rather than a complete reinstall.

The upgrade took about two and a half hours: an hour to download and then the rest to update. If I didn't have Tex installed, I think it would have been considerably faster.

Problem: Wireless did not come back up :-(
The hardware driver wizard popped up and recommended the Broadcom B43 driver. After some initial reluctance (I have previously spent days trying to get wireless to work) and some searching in the ubuntu forums, I decided that this was probably the simplest option. Plugging in the trusty Cat 5 ethernet cable and clicking 'enable' meant that the driver was downloaded. A quick reboot and all was in order.

Alternative solutions can be found here and here and here.

It is possible that if the bandwidth via this driver is worse than I am used to I will go down the ndiswrapper route instead, but for now this will do fine.

What have I noticed that is different?
Firefox is now a late beta of version 3. Seems rather nice, particularly the list of pages that comes up when you start typing in the address bar. Needs more exploration before I can say much more about it.

New icons for OpenOffice documents. A small change, presumably OpenOffice has moved up a version too.

I'll report back on anything else I notice later.

Repartitioning went fine. No problems at all.

The update to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon also went very well, with the wireless connection coming straight back up. Just a few niggles to sort out:

1 - The mozilla thunderbird icon disappeared from the quick launch tray. Easy to reinstate.

2 - The clock settings went very strange. This is due to the machine dual booting with windows and both operating systems trying to set the computer's hardware clock to British Summer Time. Resolved in Linux by unchecking the box marked 'use UTC'

3 - Flash. I've been using the flashplugin-nonfree package. The package was still installed, but flash wasn't working. Uninstalling and reinstalling this package in synaptic got flash working again, but the next reboot brought the same problem up.

In firefox, type about:plugins into the address bar to see what plugins are installed. I found three different versions of flash installed. Made note of the dates of each version and went looking for the older versions to delete them.

The file that flashplugin-nonfree gets is called libflashplayer.so. Likely places to find it are in usr/lib/firefox/plugins, myhomedir/.mozilla/plugins, usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree

This last one was the most recent version. Deleting the other versions fixed the problem.

Backing Up and Upgrading

Today I'm using a Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop running Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. The object of the day is to end up with it running 7.10. Since 8.04 is released in a few weeks, I'm intending just to do an upgrade, not a complete rebuild.

The story so far:

Problem 1:

The software updater has been telling me for months that the upgrade is available, but that there isn't enough space on the root partition to put the files needed to upgrade. Fine, no problem, I'll repartition.

Problem 2:

Not being particularly confident with partitioning, I decide to do a complete backup of my home directory onto DVD+R. Several days ago I ordered some DVDs and they have now arrived. So, how to burn DVDs. The Ubuntu Forums suggest Gnomebaker so I download it and try to burn a DVD. It won't burn because of problems with the number of levels of embedded directories (see thread). I download K3B and try again. It all works fine.

Repartitioning:
I have a livecd of GParted.
The extended partition that Ubuntu lives on currently has a 4GB ext3 (I think) partition for /, followed by a swap partition, followed by a 60GB or so /home partition. In order to upgrade, I need to move and resize /home, move the swap partition and increase the size of / to about 10GB, to allow for future upgrades etc.

Here goes.