Niels Christian's blog

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

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.

Here is a little update on my Ubuntu adventure. I have now been using Ubuntu on my laptop for more than one month. Mainly it has been for surfing on the Internet and watching movies and listening to music.

Back on my windows system I have used Firefox, VLC and Winamp for these issues. Luckily, both Firefox and VLC is cross platform compatible (compiled for both systems), which means I only had to find a new music player. Firefox was preinstalled in Ubuntu and VLC was not, but was easily installed via the add/remove utility. The standard movie player in Ubuntu is something called Totem Movie Player. I didn’t wanna spend any time on this application, but before I installed VLC I tried watching movies in it, but it required a lot of codecs installed separately. Thats why I then installed VLC, it requires no codecs and plays almost every video format. No problems in that.

About the music player, I had to find a one that suited me. One is called xmms, it is a lot like Winamp, I have tried it out from previous experiences with the linux platform. It’s not bad. The standard music player in Ubuntu is called Rythmbox. It reminds me of apples iTunes. Back in Windows I tried iTunes once. I never liked it, it messed up the files and directories and stuff. As I used Winamp I also used the plugin it has for my iPod. It has only the most necessary functions for managing music on the iPod, which is moving files from your PC to the device and vice versa.

With Rythmbox It’s so much better. It is probably like iTunes(never tried iTunes with my iPod). With Rythmbox I can play my music directly from my iPod, I can sort by album, artist, song, title and more. Import the music you have on you harddrive and you can manage it. It gives a good overview of your music and is really organised. And it does not move your files around the hard drive.

So I will stick with these programs, though there are many others, but I am more satisfied with this setup in Ubuntu than the setup I had in Windows. So far so good.

Some days ago I was recovering my Windows XP system on my laptop, but something went wrong during the installation process and the windows boot loader was non existent. Then I searched the net for some solution for this, but the solutions I found didn’t really work well. So I came up with this home made solution. Put some Linux distribution onto the computer and trash Microsoft Windows. So I did.

When I bought my first computer (year 2001) it had Microsoft’s Windows ME pre-installed, at that time I didn’t know anything but basics about computers, which was what I had learned in school (most of it by myself due my curious mind). Thus I didn’t know anything but Windows systems, I didn’t even know anything else existed.

Then I started in high school and learned a lot about computers from my roommate. I got to know that there is something called OS (Operating System) and that windows was not the only desktop OS. I tried some Linux distribution, but I never really got the idea, I was too far down the road of Windows systems to understand this system, that seemed so strange to me. Occasionally I have been trying different Linux distributions since, but never got the feel.

What kept me away from Linux has mostly been hardware driver troubles and the fact that most games is only developed for windows. The wireless network drivers has been hard to configure and that, especially, kept me away.

Now that I installed Ubuntu(Ubuntu is a linux distribution), I had no problems with anything. Everything worked out of the box. So I am gonna stick with this. Applications doesn’t work for both windows and Linux, but some has been compiled to both systems, e.g. Mozilla Firefox and OpenOffice.org, which both are part of the ubuntu package.

Most importantly to note about this conversion, is that most Linux distributions are free. Actually, you have to look hard to find one that isn’t. And there is so much software for linux that is free. In windows I had some programs that I have used a lot and they dont exists for linux. But doing a little search( only a little search, it takes no more) and you have found an application that does the exact same job for you in Linux.

Conclusion

If you have any kind of troubles with Windows, just install Ubuntu, it works out of the box, and probably wont cause any problems if you work with it as a home desktop for internet browsing and office packages.

Just install it. In fact, you can now install Ubuntu as an application on your Windows desktop, so you have no longer any excuses not to try it it out

Note: I will keep posting about my ubuntu experiences when something comes up.