Webcam doesn't work in Skype, but works in Cheese

If your video camera doesn't work in Skype on Ubuntu, but it works in other applications (like Cheese), just run the following script:


sudo echo '#!/bin/bash' > /usr/local/bin/skype
sudo echo "LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype" >> /usr/local/bin/skype
sudo chmod ogu+x /usr/local/bin/skype


If you're running 64-bit Ubuntu, the path is somewhat different:


sudo echo '#!/bin/bash' > /usr/local/bin/skype
sudo echo "LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype" >> /usr/local/bin/skype
sudo chmod ogu+x /usr/local/bin/skype


Favourite packages for Ubuntu Intrepid

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, the 8.10 release. I use "upgraded" in the general term because the distribution upgrade option has never worked for me – I did a clean install.

Add the Medibuntu repository.

then:

sudo apt-get install aacgain acidrip acroread acroread-plugins audacious azureus cabextract easytag ffmpeg flashplugin-nonfree gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse gtkpod-aac hardinfo inkscape libdvdcss2 libdvdread3 libdvdread3 libxine1-ffmpeg meld mozilla-acroread mozilla-mplayer mozilla-plugin-vlc mp3gain mplayer msttcorefonts network-manager-pptp openclipart-openoffice.org nfs-common nfs-kernel-server portmap rapidsvn skype smartmontools smbfs totem-xine ubuntu-restricted-extras unrar vlc vlc-plugin-esd w64codecs wine

Favourite packages for Ubuntu

This installs Broadcom wireless, evil ATI driver, VLC, DVD reading, codecs for everything -- all on my amd64 install of Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

I don't know if anybody else will care to use this, but it gives me every package I need.

sudo echo "\n## Medibuntu - Ubuntu 8.04 \"hardy\"\n## Please report any bug on https://bugs.launchpad.net/medibuntu/\nsudo echo "deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 libdvdread3 flashplugin-nonfree smbfs vlc vlc-plugin-esd mozilla-plugin-vlc gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg libxine1-ffmpeg libdvdread3 w64codecs ffmpeg totem-xine acidrip brasero banshee b43-fwcutter acroread mozilla-acroread acroread-plugins xorg-driver-fglrx azureus inkscape mplayer mozilla-mplayer msttcorefonts wine cabextract nfs-kernel-server nfs-common portmap network-manager-gnome network-manager-pptp unrar rapidsvn audacious meld easytag gtkpod-aac smartmontools xtightvncviewer

and for the SqueezeCenter:

sudo sh
echo "deb http://debian.slimdevices.com testing main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list ; apt-get update; apt-get install squeezecenter

Thanks to:

• Medibuntu for Hardy Heron

Adobe AIR blows on Linux

I recently decided I wanted to try out twhirl. Since I'm on Ubuntu Gutsy, twhirl runs on Adobe AIR, I knew it was trouble, but I thought I'd give it a try. After all, I recalled reading about an alpha release of AIR. Okay, so I got what I asked for.

So first off, twhirl doesn't work. After installing AIR (which actually wasn't too bad, despite "chmod 777" instructions that would murder a newbie). The webpage-embedded install wouldn't work. So I gave up.

Then, two days later, I try to open an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet (.ODS). Adobe AIR hijacked the .ODS extension! I can't open my spreadsheet? What the FUCK?!? So I right-clicked on my file, went to Properties, Open With, and added OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet. That should work, right? Wrong-o. This thing hijacked the mime type for .ODS and made it "Adobe AIR Application". So now I can't open my spreadsheets, because I get this error:
and when I try to open an AIR application it tries to open it in OOo!

Of course, it installed Goddess only knows what binaries on my machine. For all I know I've been rootkitted. I have no clue how to remove it – the release notes have nothing to say on the subject.

I can fix this. I can fix my MIME types and track down and murder the crapware I've infected my machine with. But word to the wise: do NOT install the Adobe AIR alpha on a machine that you want to do actual work with, because it will be fuxored. Just goes to show you the lack of depth of Adobe's understanding of Linux, their limited capability and exposure to the platform. Furthermore, it goes to show they don't understand the free software universe if they're going to hijack the file extension for frigging OOo.

---

Here's a fix:

sudo "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils/xdg-mime" uninstall "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/support/AdobeAIR.xml"
sudo gedit "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/support/AdobeAIR.xml"

... remove these three lines:

<magic priority="100">
<match type="string" value="PK\003\004" offset="0"/>
</magic>

then:

sudo "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils/xdg-mime" install --mode system --novendor "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/support/AdobeAIR.xml"

... and you're welcome, Adobe. Maybe you could update those release notes? No? I thought not.

Fix slow Ubuntu shutdown with CIFS (SMBFS)

My Ubuntu machine at home always takes a bazillion years to turn off. I've been seeing this "Server not responding" error forever, but I've just ignored it. An explanation from the article "Five things to do on a freshly installed Ubuntu":

CIFS: Unmount CIFS shares before shutting down the network

There is a very nasty bug in Ubuntu, which occurs, if you use NetworkManager and have any active CIFS share while shutting down your system. If you do that, you'll experience a timeout while shutting down, lengthening it by ~30 seconds per share. You'll also get the message CIFS VFS: Server not responding.

There is a bug entry on launchpad, but it is not yet fixed. Fortunately, there is an easy workaround.

Here are my simplified instructions:

cd /etc/init.d
sudo wget http://www.jejik.com/files/examples/umountcifs
sudo chmod ugo+x umountcifs
sudo update-rc.d umountcifs stop 02 0 6 .

That ought to take care of it.

Speech synthesis on Ubuntu

Text-to-speech (TTS) has been around for a couple of decades, and it keeps getting better. There are a bunch of really fun untapped applications for it, combining RSS, filters (like Pipes), podcasts, telephony, and hidden speakers.

Under Linux there is a nice package available called Festival. To get started, grab an appropriate package, such as:

• festvox-hi-nsk (Hindi male)
• festvox-kallpc16k (american English male)
• festvox-rablpc16k (British English male)
• festvox-mr-nsk (Marathi male)
• festvox-suopuhe-lj Finnish female
• festvox-suopuhe-mv (Finnish male)
• festvox-te-nsk (Telugu male)

Too bad you can't get a female speaker except in Finnish. (I had never heard of the Indian languages Marathi and Telugu, and I consider myself a language buff... sigh.)

The results are pretty good. Here's how to use it from the command line:

text2wave text-file.txt -o audio-file.wav

For extra fun, use pidgin-festival to turn incoming instant messages into speech (use festival-gaim if you haven't made the jump to Hardy Heron yet).

BlackBerry support in Ubuntu Gutsy

To charge or backup your BlackBerry device under Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, there is a nice little GPL package named barry put together by some nice folks in Ontario. It isn't part of the Ubuntu software catalog yet, so here are some steps to get this up and running. (Note: the authors give instructions on how to build it from source – take your pick.)

First, you'll need to install an updated version of libopensync0 (0.22). Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

#opensync
deb http://opensync.gforge.punktart.de/repo/opensync-0.21/ etch main
deb-src http://opensync.gforge.punktart.de/repo/opensync-0.21/ etch main

So, go get that along with some other prerequisites:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libopensync0 libglademm-2.4-1c2a libtar

Then, download and install barry.

wget "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/barry/libbarry_0.9-1_i386.deb?modtime=1192146928&big_mirror=0"
wget "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/barry/barry-util_0.9-1_i386.deb?modtime=1192146873&big_mirror=0"
wget "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/barry/barrybackup-gui_0.9-1_i386.deb?modtime=1192146747&big_mirror=0"
wget "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/barry/libbarry-dev_0.9-1_i386.deb?modtime=1192146953&big_mirror=0"
wget "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/barry/libopensync-plugin-barry_0.9-1_i386.deb?modtime=1192147004&big_mirror=0"
sudo dpkg -i libbarry_0.9-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i barry-util_0.9-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i barrybackup-gui_0.9-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i libbarry-dev_0.9-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i libopensync-plugin-barry_0.9-1_i386.deb

Note: you probably don't need the libbarry-dev package unless you plan to develop with this stuff, but I installed it anyhow. Won't hurt anything. The libopensync package should enable some sort of integration with your local copy of Evolution or Thunderbird, but I haven't tried it.

After all you can plug your BlackBerry into the USB port and it will finally charge. These packages don't put any entries in the Gnome menu system, but you can run "barrybackup" which will let you back up all data (and restore, if you want).

Building Pidgin on Ubuntu with all the fixin's

I had a heck of a time finding the packages I needed to install so that Pidgin would compile with all of its extensions and protocols – particularly screen saver integration for "away" status. Hopefully a good version will be included in Gutsy. These are the components I needed for building Pidgin 2.10 under Edgy. (Why am I still on Edgy? Because distribution upgrade didn't work from Dapper to Edgy, so I mistrust it, and I haven't set aside a morning to upgrade.)

I spent the most time figuring out which packages would contain mono.pc and gstreamer0.10.pc – once I figured that out it went a lot faster. Hope this helps -- it probably isn't everything, but it's most of it. Start with a nice howto, and use the stuff below to turn on the other options.

sudo apt-get install libstartup-notification0-dev libperl-dev libnm-glib-dev libgadu-dev libsilc-dev libhowl-dev libavahi-compat-howl-dev libsqlite-dev libnspr-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libdbus-1-dev libgtkspell-dev libmono-dev libxss-dev libebook1.2-dev libedata-book1.2-dev libsqlite3-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev tcl8.4-dev tk8.4-dev libmeanwhile-dev liblaunchpad-integration0 libnm-glib0

./configure --enable-gnutls=yes --enable-mono --enable-nm --enable-consoleui --enable-gevolution --enable-gstreamer --enable-plugins --disable-schemas-install --enable-screensaver --enable-tcl --enable-tk

Stop password nagging in Ubuntu

Finally... turn off the Gnome Keyring in Ubuntu that nags you to enter your password again immediately after logging in. This has bugged me since I started using Ubuntu, and I've tried to turn it off before, but couldn't make it work. Finally now there's an easy(-ier) way to do it.

Ubuntu Forums: Stop having to enter keyring over and over again

Ubuntu on Dell

It's now official: the rumours, buzz, and conjecture were correct, and Dell Computer will be shipping Ubuntu Linux on their machines. This is the cannon-shot, folks.

With official vendor support on the desktop Linux will get the sort of sustained device support it needs to be truly practical. Ubuntu is a great distribution: I've used it now for a year and a half, and it keeps getting better and better. There are a few details about which models. I'm wondering whether they be providing open source drivers (or just keep pushing non-free BLOBs).

For Ubuntu, today feels like 1990 all over again, when Windows was new, exciting, and fresh, and had a future ahead of it. The vendors are lining up behind it: first Sun made Ubuntu the first distro to get all of Java included as a first-class citizen, and now a hardware heavyweight is on board as well. Microsoft must have some friends or allies, but it's hard to see what leverage they have when customers are rebelling at the prospect of moving to Vista, and hardware vendors are once again giving them XP.

My switch to Ubuntu

When my brother-in-law asked me about my experiences I realized I needed to write an article (and beat Cory Doctorow to it).

I switched my Dell Latitude D600 to Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) back in December of 2005. I haven't looked back. Although sometimes I run Windows in emulation, that's becoming increasingly rare. Basically, I use free software for almost everything I do, and it feels great.

I'm using Edgy Eft for my work desktop, as I haven't set aside two hours to rebuild it. But I just installed Feisty Fawn on Adolfo's old laptop (amd64) and it is quite nice -- a big upgrade from Edgy in terms of ease-of-setup.

Automatix is the must-have resource for downloading the usual necessities like codecs.

Device drivers can be problematic as some things (like Blackberry) are just a black hole. Digital cameras however almost always just use the standard USB disk driver, so that "just works". iPods work too (even without iTunes). USB scanners that I've tried have just worked as well, as have the webcams I've used. So, no complaints.

The biggest problems are generally with Broadcom wifi chipsets, cheap printers, and ATI video cards. Feisty has built in support for them, but you still have to jump through a couple of hoops at setup, depending on your hardware. Depending on the printer it can be kind of a pain (my HP Laserjet 1000 was just hopeless, and although I got it to work, I finally just gave it away). However, if the printer isn't local it is usually pretty straightforward, as the biggest problem is around firmware. [Man, I hate hardware manufacturers who put the device firmware in the driver.]

Samba is pretty easy these days, though mostly I don't bother (except as a client) -- I have a NAS drive that I use for file sharing, and a network-enabled printer (new colour laser!) -- so if you're setting up a laptop, networking shouldn't be a big deal.

I don't use any virus scanning at all. It does exist, but who cares: I get my stuff either through the official Ubuntu packages (apt-get) or I download source (and the latter very rarely these days). Basically, you just don't worry about viruses or spyware on Linux. The software updates are all centralized in the distribution, are fast, and don't nag you about rebooting. In short, a much better user experience than Windows. But what isn't these days...

A year and a half ago when I first tried it Ubuntu was quite an adventure, but it has now become quite polished. (I flirted with Gentoo for a while, but lost interest in the flexibility. Choices == headaches.)

I have officially stopped providing free Windows support. I thought I was helping friends & family all those years, and it turns out I was just letting Microsoft continue to ship crappy software. Now I have an alternative – and I will help friends run Linux, but not Windows. Microsoft: I quit. Good luck replacing me.