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 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…

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…

The new location of the close, minimise and maximise buttons in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is dividing opinion. Personally, I have no problem with them. I’ve been using a Mac recently at work, and so having the control buttons on the left hand side of the window is becoming second nature.

I have been asked how to change the location back to the right. It is very simple, so here goes: Read more…