Ubuntu + Flash = <3

Finally! I have tried so many so called “solutions” to get Ubuntu and Flash to play nicely together to play Youtube.com fullscreen. After trying so many, the overload gpu trick, media.cfg, a Firefox app supposed to auto fix it, random lines of code, I’ve finally found a fix that works, at least for me. Well, its not very refined, I can’t figure out which of these two following fixes did it, or if they both did, but here goes (btw I have tested this to work in Chromium):

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How To Use Standard Gnome Notification Bubbles in Ubuntu

I followed this guide to greatly improve the Ubuntu Natty Narwhal notification system. This notification system has many great features such as stackable notifications, click to remove notificaitions, skip buttons to skip banshee songs, and theme-ability.

Nautilus Elementary Breadcrumbs

Nautilus Elementary lacked the nice breadcrumb layout when on the default Ambiance theme, so here is a simple fix to bring it to you.

Pithos the Quiter

Pithos, a Linux app the streams Pandora Radio natively without the clunky flash webapp or any sort of browser being open, would consistantly crash after a few songs and would have to be restarted to continue playing. I found a fix on this website: Pithos Launchpad. The fix requires creating a file with the name pithos.patch and then putting this text inside (Updated with a link to the file. WordPress wouldn’t display the code right. You can retrieve it using wget https://launchpadlibrarian.net/70116767/pithos.patch ):

https://launchpadlibrarian.net/70116767/pithos.patch

Here is also a Google Docs link just incase the launchpad every goes down:

http://goo.gl/r7YCq

Then your run these commands:

$ which pithos
/usr/bin/pithos

$ cd /usr/bin/

$ patch pithos < /path/to/pithos.patch

That succesfully fixed my Pithos installation to continuesly play the music without stopping. Pithos rocks now!

Screen On, Screen Off

Following a guide on Ubuntu Forums, I set up a program called BlueProximity that detects the distance my phone is away and when my phone reaches a certain distance, locks my computer. When my phone gets close enough, it unlock it again! That’s really cool :). I have it set up so when I walk out of the room my computer locks and when I walk back in it unlocks. How convenient!

Mac, Ubuntu, Windows….Uh Oh, Can’t Boot

After successfully installing Mac OSX 10.6.6 on my brother’s Sony VAIO, my dad needed the hard-drive expanded to install XCODE for Iphone dev. First, I tried shrinking the Windows partition and merging it into the Mac partition. I could shrink the Windows partition but unfortunatly couldn’t merge it with the Mac one. I tried to create a new partition from the empty space in Ubuntu but it said it couldn’t because 4 was the max unless it was an extended partition :(. I then decided to delete the Ubuntu partition from windows and format it to fat32, a universal filesystem. Mac would be able to see it but, after  trying to boot back up, grub rescue> came up. Duh! Grub was installed with Ubuntu! It worked and I finally installed XCODE after I booted up from my USB Ubuntu Live CD and reinstalled GRUB with these instructions:

Multiple Firefox Windows

I have found myself wanting to work with multiple Firefox windows open because of my dual monitor setup. When closing Firefox through conventional means though, it wouldn’t save one of the windows. Fortunately, I have found a solution: by closing Firefox from File > Quit or by using Control Q. When I reopen Firefox both windows open with all my tabs!

DVD – Still Rippin’

I’ve been trying to find the easiest solution for ripping DVDs to a format stream-able to my Droid X but currently stuck using a three step process. First I have to rip the DVDs in Windows on my main computer using 1Click DVD Copy. This outputs a Video_TS folder structure. I then copy the Video_TS folder and its parent folder onto my external hard-drive attached to my server. There I begin the encoding process with Handbrake which encodes it into a mp4 file ~2.5gb big. After this I use Super to encode it again into a smaller, stream-able mp4 file that looks good and can stream to my phone over DLNA.

Ubuntu – I Control My Hardrive

I have been suffering a problem with my NTFS partitions, I couldn’t delete the files on them to trash! After trying many different things I finally found a solution.

I install PYSDM from the Software Center and set the drives to auto-mount. Then I replaced this line in /etc/fstab

#Entry for /dev/sdb7 :
UUID=01CB886B4DC9A550                      /media/Downloads_and_Important  ntfs-3g    defaults,    0    0

With

#Entry for /dev/sdb7 :
UUID=01CB886B4DC9A550                      /media/Downloads_and_Important  ntfs-3g    defaults,umask=002,fmask=113,gid=100,uid=1000    0    0

This gave me, my account alex – Alex-Wendland, full control over the drives and succesfully deleted the files to trash like it should!