I love alliterative post titles! But I didn’t like the fact that even with my little 64-bit Flash for Ubuntu installer script (updated now, by the way), Flash videos would “freeze” in full-screen. The sound would continue, but the video would freeze. If I pressed Escape to exit full-screen mode, then everything would be fine – it’s just that Flash would never run in full-screen. John Lewis commented about a PPA fix on his blog, but I couldn’t get the PPA to work. I now have a different fix for this, which – so far – seems to be working. Read more…

Every new release of Watchtower Library seems to require a new set of instructions to install, and Watchtower Library 2010 is no exception. After happily using the 2009 edition on Ubuntu for some time, I installed the new version expecting the same flawless behaviour; however it nastily crashed and burned with “The program WTLibrary.exe has encountered a serious problem and needs to close…” Running it from the terminal didn’t help either. I just got a lot of errors, including “Unhandled page fault on read access to 0×00000000″ After a lot of messing around, this solution got Watchtower Library working on my Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit installation. Read more…

I have so many things that I want to blog about at the moment, and absolutely no time to do it! Anyway, it seems that the most popular topic on my blog is how to install Flash for Lucid Lynx 64-bit edition. My previous script has been downloaded many thousands of times, and seems to work ok. Now, though, Adobe have released a 64-bit Flash plugin for Linux – codenamed “Square”. If, like me, your Flash plugin stopped working after a recent batch of updates, then “Square” could be just what you’re looking for. Read more…

After a lot of indecision, a friend of mine decided to bravely enter the Internet age with an Acer Aspire One ZG5 netbook. Since we’d had such success with Kim’s netbook, I recommended that he get the same one. Again, as before, I removed the default Linpus operating system and installed Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition.

UNE is very pretty. It has the default Lucid purple theme, and boots up quickly on the little Acer. Although you won’t get full compositing, there are a few nice touches in the GUI, which somehow make it feel very “solid”. All was going well until, after a brief “Awakenings” moment when I was able to authenticate to the wireless network, the WiFi card decided that enough was enough and appeared in the network manager as disabled! Read more…

After finally disinfecting my laptop of the Windows Vista virus, I had a large chunk (100Gb) of free space on a separate partition. My idea, then, was to move my /home folder to a separate partition. This would mean that future operating system upgrades would (should) be much easier, and it would give me more room to spread out my famously well organised filing structure (ahem). As it turns out, resizing partitions and then moving /home is not as difficult as I thought. Read more…

Sometimes the most scary looking errors can be quite easy to solve. When a package installation is interrupted, or fails, Ubuntu Software Center may refuse to allow you to install any other package from that point on. It responds with a rather friendly and helpful-looking message: “The installation could have failed because of an error in the corresponding software package or it was cancelled in an unfriendly way. You have to repair this before you can install or remove any further software.” But then doesn’t give any instructions as to how to fix the error! Read more…

This is an odd problem. A friend of mine reported it to me after he’d performed a clean installation of Ubuntu 10.04 in VMWare 7. The keyboard worked fine all the way through the installation, but then stopped working on reboot. The only way he could input characters was to use the on-screen keyboard, which is about as convenient as typing with your nose! The keyboard would then usually work after logging in. Read more…

My previous post on this subject provided a quick way of getting Adobe Flash player working under Ubuntu 10.04 x64. It used a rather nice shell script, which got Flash player working, but obviously at the expense of updates via the Ubuntu repositories. I’m now happy to report that I have Flash player working from the repositories. Here’s how to do it: Read more…

Disclaimer: This post is not meant to cover every aspect of dual-booting – it is a general guide, so use these commands at your own risk. If you’re in doubt – don’t do it. Ask for help instead!

One of the most troublesome aspects of upgrading appears to be getting operating systems to play nicely together (or at least to co-exist peacefully) – particularly if you normally dual-boot between Ubuntu and Windows. I’ve had some difficulties on one machine with dual-boot. So here are the results of my investigations. Read more…

The subtitle to this post should be “Why HTML5 is a ‘Good Thing’” – I’m not averse to Flash and Silverlight, but these browser extensions can cause problems. Another machine I’d upgraded to 10.04 had a strange problem whereby Firefox would crash seconds after being launched. Generally I wouldn’t worry about it, since I use Chrome anyway, but I don’t like any software crashing for no reason! The solution was very simple. Read more…