General Linux

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).

Choose whatever version of Linux you want at Distrowatch.com. It's a great site that has ratings based on the number of people who view the distro page on thier site.

For General Ubuntu Help, go to Ubuntuforums.org. A GREAT resource for Ubuntu help; you can also try the #Ubuntu channel on IRC.

An awesome program to to get all the normal stuff you want for Ubuntu - Automatix. They have lots of new features and are really good at it now.

I am proud to say that VPNC works great. I still have to do a little more configuring to make it so that I no longer have to input all the parameters each time I log in. I am writing from the school library using Ubuntu and VPNC as my connection. For those of you out there who need to use VPN and find Cisco's product troublesome, this is a great solution.

I note that it needs to be run as root to have the proper access. Also you need to know what gateway you are logging on to, the group name and password as well as your own name and password. It does however make those public connections much more secure. I am very happy to use this solution on campus, and no longer rely on windows every time I'm on campus.

Ok, well I have my new install completed and have decided to put each post here seperately.

First, for those who don't know, the best way to monitor your temp in linux is with this bad boy The Computer Temp Monitor. Now you do have to install the required programs, listed here. You also need to have ACPI or a similarly supported parameter.

I had to use Synaptic to install 'libxml-parser-perl' and I think one of the GTK things. Now this was done after installing automatix and doing several things with it. Regardless, this all works well and I really like the control it gives me. I don't even have this kind of functionality in Windows with the same hardware.

Well, I installed compiz and I had problems with not unmounting the drive in windows before mounting it in linux and all kinds of other stuff, so now I don't even get a menu bar when I log on and Firefox won't save any settings. I think I'm going to have to reinstall Linux and all my goodies, and I think I'll leave off Compiz at least this time around. I'd like to use this laptop for more general purposes and I think I'd like to keep it a little more on the safe side.

I'll post my findings when I learn of the new things I have to do. Until then, if anyone has any ideas on what I can customize, add a comment on here. I am fully open to suggestions.

Ubuntu updated their repository to now include version 1.4.2 of Amarok. Wow is this thing awesome. I like the new look alot and it plays music really well. What I really like is the added functionality in the menus. The last.fm playlist feature is great. I've been listening to other peoples music a lot now.

In the past I've loved Amarok but I started to use Listen music player since it fit with Gnome and GTK. Listen is good, but it just doesn't have the same feel and layout design as amarok. I have to say that amarok really takes the cake here. They've basically beat up and stole Listen's lunch money. I'm going to be using amarok a lot more now, it's just awesome.

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.

Thought I might post some tricks and hacks that I found in my searching on teh interweb. You can copy paste any of the commands into your browser.

Read on for some good tips.

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: