Ok, so I haven’t been totally wasting my time while waiting for Natty to be released (well…after reading this post, you might think that I have been wasting my time!!), so I decided to replace the default GNOME desktop manager with GNOME 3, which was released earlier this month. There are plenty of posts about how to do this, but here is what worked on my installation. Read more…

It’s amazing the things I learn when helping my friend Josh. Yesterday lunchtime I was learning how to repair his shoe with a curved leather needle, and in the evening I was installing his new Sky+ HD box as an upgrade! Interestingly Sky had said that there was no provision for a user-installed upgrade in Ireland – you had to pay the €60 installation fee. This turned out not to be true – Read more…

I had always thought I was the gadget freak in our family, but Kim is starting to put me to shame with her new PDA powered by Windows Mobile 6. Of course, this raised the natural question: “how do I sync this with my Linux netbook?” It is possible, and not that difficult, but the instructions found on the Internet are incomplete and, at times, confusing. So here is my complete guide to setting up a Windows Mobile PDA to Linux synchronisation! 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…

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…

Strange how, for years, I stuck with just Firefox. Now, I flip regularly between Google Chrome, Opera and Firefox depending on my mood or particular task.

Anyway, I wasn’t content to wait for the official standard Ubuntu repositories to be updated with Firefox 3.6, so – if you want to get the latest version of Firefox on your system, here’s how to do it on Karmic: Read more…