Free as in Beer

I recently had the opportunity, installed through Automatix, to try out the new Flash Player 9 beta. I know some of you are purists and feel that everything should be free software. Though I respect your opinion and wish it was that easy, I am willing to accept some proprietary programs on my machine.

That being said, I have several sites I like that use Flash, mainly for video. The main ones being homestarruner.com, youtube, and ABC for the online full shows of Lost (our cable is too expensive here and that's about all I want to watch anyway).

Through my research I found out that XGL is just useless by it's self. Compiz is what allows it to do so many awesome things. That kinda helps to get the idea of why you have to install compiz and why you always hear about them together.

XGL is an add-on to x-server that allows it to do bend windows and make your desktop into a cube and other things it can't do by itself. It really is cool and I believe it's worth installing. That requires that you find good instructions that are up to date. I found such instructions at compiz's own web site www.compiz.net. These are up to date as of 8/2006. They may still be up to date in the future too but if not, I advise that you search on compiz.net to find your instructions. I had tried a set I found through google and they didn't work. It actually screwed some things up I had to fix, also I tried instructions from the Ubuntu Forums and they were less than successful.

I have spent weeks trying to figure out how to convert my .rm and .ram files to mp3. I finally found it by searching for something to encode an mp3 from a wma. This works for wma, Real Media or any other format that your mplayer is set up to play. Also so everyone knows I did not come up with this on my own, I found it here and had to make some changes to make it compatible with enhancements in mplayer.

Here are the steps: