Niels Christian's blog

YouTube – The Website Is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude.

Very funny video showing how tech support really works.

Through the time I have used ubuntu I have watched several movies and shows, but never from DVD’s. DVD’s can not be played on the ubuntu system without installing some libraries first. This is because of an encryption system used on many commercial DVD’s, Content Scrambling System. Support for this is not packaged with the standard Ubuntu install.

To get the DVD’s working there are 3 libraries that need installation: libdvdread3, libdvdnav4 and libdvdcss2. It may be needed to add multiverse and restricted drivers to the source list for this to work, I am not quite sure about this.
The libraries can be installed from the terminal:

sudo aptitude install libdvdnav4 libdvdread3 libdvdcss2

Thats all it needs to enable DVD support. But I recommend removing the standard totem movie player and installing VLC media player. To do this, enter the following lines in the terminal:

sudo aptitude remove –purge totem totem-gstreamer

sudo aptitude install vlc

Thats all it needs to get the Ubuntu system ready for DVD watching. Enjoy

I have now been running linux (ubuntu) on my laptop for several months. There has been minor challenges when I have tryed to do some more advanced stuff, like running applications that originally was made for microsoft windows operating systems. Generally the system has been running just fine all this time.

Then the last couple of days my firefox has been messed up. After updates for firefox automatically was downloaded and installed through the packege manager, firefox had several different problems. One being my bookmarks removed, which is one the things thats most important not to lose for me. I tryed restoring it from the backups (new feature in firefox 3 ), it just didnt work. Next, I tested if I could add bookmarks, but could not. Other less important issues also occured, none of which I could fix. I went as far as installing firefox 2 because I gave up on this. But, even though I didnt change anything, firefox 3 now works again. It is really weird, I don’t know what has happened, but I have a clue that it was the memory that was reason.

I am concidering to try out linuxmint once when I get time for it . It is a linux distribution that originated from the ubuntu project, but its a little different. Also, I am gonna try out some different desktop shells/window managers, so far I have been using the standard in ubuntu, Gnome. Gnome is an excelent window manager doing the job very well. But I wanna test others for the fun of it. Some are highly costumizable and I like that a lot. Interesting ones are fluxbox, enlightenment, kde, xfce and maybe others

Warcraft is not designet to run on the linux system. But using wine, it is actually posible to play the game.

Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix.

From Winehq.com

So, basicly you should be able to run windows software on the linux system. But not everything runs as good as you could wish. Warcraft III was able to run on the system. I installed it and renamed movie directory inside the warcraft III directory. This way I disabled the movies from the game. Also, I could have deleted them. But since the movies in the game was stopping the game from running properly, it was necessary. Then I ran a test game on Battle.net. It was fine, except its runs slower than on the windows system, so a had to lower the graphics settings. But thats about the computer.

But playing warcraft III on battle.net is not really appealing, theres is too much delays and more. Then it is good that someone made a gaming platform called Garena. It is some kind of Virtual Private Network. It has lots of users, and the delay is minimal. This works for windows and macs as well. But running this in wine seemed good, right untill I tried the “Start Game” button. All though the game path is set, the game just doesn’t start and Garena freeze. This is as of version 2.4 of Garena. I have not yet found any solution to this. Hopfully it get to work in a future version of the program.

It seems that not everything is easy in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has a lot of updates.. its like every time I run the system, which is a couple of times per week. So.. I have tried to update the system many times, but with the update manager which is a tool that takes care of all the hard work and presents an easy to understand user interface. So basicly, its really easy to update, all you have to do is press the check button and wait for the update check to finish, then press the install button. Thats it.

Except if there is errors of course. That’s exactly what just happened. When I tryed to install updates I got an error message, it told me what to do: go to the console and execute the following command. My first thought was that I now had to get into all the console stuff and understand how it all worked to be able to complete this, but no. I put the line in, hit enter and waited (as root). It finished and I tryed the update manager again, problem solved.

I did get a single error during the command line stuff, but I ignored it though and tryed and see what would happen. It seems the error is nothing important.

My conclusion here is that even though you have an error and you need to use the terminal, still you need not think, since Ubuntu tells you what to do. Suits me very well.