Good old Skype, it seems to have been in Linux Beta forever! I suppose now that Skype is part of the happy Microsoft “family”, it probably always will.
Anyway, I recently had a problem where Skype would not open on my Ubuntu 11.04 laptop. Well, to be precise, Skype opened and closed immediately. The solution was simple enough. 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…
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…
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…
There’s no doubt about the fact that, for me, Lucid 64-bit is a vast improvement over Karmic 32-bit – in terms of performance, anyway. I’m still having a few teething problems, but happily they’re minor. One issue I have (again) is with VirtualBox and USB support. I had to install the 64-bit Karmic version of VirtualBox (3.1.6), since the Lucid version isn’t released yet. After importing my virtual machine, it booted up fine, but all the USB devices were greyed out! A seemingly familiar scenario, but I checked all the usual things, and it eventually became apparent that version 3.1.6 of VirtualBox has problems with USB support in Lucid 64-bit. Read more…
UPDATE 23rd September, 2010: I have created an updated script to download the latest beta release of Adobe’s 64-bit Flash plugin, codenamed “Square”. You can read more about it here.
UPDATE 7th May, 2010: I now have this working correctly from a repository. This solution will continue work, but if you want the ability to update Flash automatically when the repository is updated, then this solution may be better.
Why is it that Flash and Linux seem to have such a complicated relationship? Despite the large and increasing userbase, it seems that getting Adobe to recognise Linux is only slightly easier than getting Microsoft to recognise Wine, which, in turn, is only slightly easier than pulling a fully-laden oil tanker up the North face of the Eiger using your tongue! I had issues installing Flash in Jaunty and Karmic, so it wasn’t a surprise that Lucid would have the same problems. Read more…
My previous post on installing Watchtower Library 2008 is still one of the most popular posts on my blog. A lot has changed to make the installation easier, though, so here is an updated method for installing Watchtower Library. Read more…
Although I haven’t celebrated Christmas in nearly 30 years, I still remember, as a child, experiencing the feeling of excitement and keen anticipation. I must admit that I’ve been a bit like that waiting for the new LTS edition of Ubuntu “Lucid Lynx” to arrive. On launch day of April 29th, I was refreshing my browser every 5 minutes to see when the final release would be available. Read more…
