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 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…

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…

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…

I had a very bad technology day yesterday. If there is such a thing as the opposite of the Midas touch, then I had it in spades. One of my jobs was to create audio CDs from a lot of .aiff files with Russian names. The files were spread down a large directory tree, and every folder represented an individual CD. Normally, this is not a problem. My desktop Windows PC at work has a CD burner, and so this should have been a every easy exercise, correct? Read more…

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have successfully installed Windows 7 Ultimate as a guest operating system under VirtualBox – complete with USB drivers.

The installation was painless and easy, but when I started Windows, it kept reporting that “No Audio Device is Installed”. Audio was enabled for this guest machine in VirtualBox, but nothing was working. Read more…

It’s strange sometimes how things that should be simple can start to seem very complicated. A case in point is Skype on Kim’s Acer Aspire One. I have Skype working very well on my laptop, but after installing it on Kim’s, the microphone didn’t seem to be working at all!

Obviously, I’d followed my own advice in a previous post. I also confirmed that the microphone was working in Sound Recorder, but when I made a Skype test call, the conversation was very one-sided indeed.

A lot of digging around showed that PulseAudio treats everything as stereo – even if the microphone is mono! The two inputs cancel each other out, resulting in a stony silence for whoever you’re trying to talk to on Skype.

The solution is as follows: Read more…

This is the first of two short blog posts today. After installing Skype on Kim’s netbook, for some reason I couldn’t add it to the Startup Applications list. I’d go through the usual procedure: System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications, add it and verify it was in the list, but after a restart, the list reverted to its previous settings; no changes I made were saved.

I went investigating and it appears that others are having the same problem. Some queries on this issue were posted as little as two days ago.

The only reason I could think of was to do with permissions. The startup applications data are held in the /home/<username>/.config/autostart directory, so I checked the permissions of this folder on my laptop, running Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic and saw permissions of drwxr-xr-x. On Kim’s netbook, running Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 Karmic the permissions were set so that only root had the rights to modify this directory.

Changing the permissions, then, is a trivial matter. Simply open a terminal window and type:

sudo chmod -R o+wrx /home/<username>/.config/autostart

Obviously, replace <username> with your own username, shown before the @ sign in the command prompt. After you’ve run this command, try changing the startup applications again, and everything should work.