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 This link put me on the right track, but had the wrong (presumably out of date for this version of Ubuntu) file to edit.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.