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Dell XPS M1210 & Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) – Firefox Plugin: Java & Adobe Flash Player 9

I was originally using gnash which is an open source version of Adobe Flash Player but I find it takes up too much resources for my liking. I ended up finding this great wiki on how to install Sun Java 6 and Adobe Flash 9. There’s a little problem with the Adobe Flash 9 installer but the fix can be found on the Ubuntu Forums. In my mind, you’re better off skipping the Wiki step and just dive right into the alternative solution.

To install the Java Plugin:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-plugin

To install Adobe Flash Player 9

wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/10761023/flashplugin-nonfree_9.0.115.0ubuntu2_i386.deb

sudo dpkg -i flashplugin-nonfree_9.0.115.0ubuntu2_i386.deb

To round off Firefox, I also recommend getting the VLC plug-in so you can watch streaming videos.

sudo apt-get install mozilla-plugin-vlc

A quick restart of Firefox and everything should be ready to go. You can view your plug-ins by typing about:plugins into your address bar to see if the plugins are in fact available.

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. 07 Feb 08 | Reviews, Technology, Ubuntu, XPS m1210 | Comments (0)

Dell XPS M1210 & Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) – Mounting Network NTFS Folder

The advantage Windows has over Ubuntu is the ease of mounting network drives without installing any additional software and having it also auto-mount on startup. I know with some fancy hardware you can do the same on Ubuntu but I wanted some quick and easy. After some searching, I wrote my own script to do the trick.

#!/bin/bash
smbmount //192.168.0.103/E /home/simon/p5e3/ smfs -o guest uid=simon 0 0

I don’t fully understand what the stuff at the end means, but here’s what I know.

smbmount is the application that’ll do the a mounting

//192.168.0.1.103/E is the E drive on my PC with IP 192.168.0.103 that I want to mount.

/home/simon/p5e3/ is the folder I want to mount the networked drive to

smfs is the file system. I’m taking a stab at this. If you’re copying and pasting this for your own use, leave it as it.

-o guest all I know about this is that by declaring it as a guest, I get full access to the networked E drive. That includes read, write and execute. I believe you can only do this if the network drive is public and the permissions are set on the NTFS to be read/write/executable.

uid=simon that’s be my login

0 0 probably has something to do with permission.

You can make the procedure more complicated by adding logins and passwords but that’s too much for your average home user, at least in my opinon.

Once you’ve made your script in gedit, vi, nano or with your favourite text editor, you’ll want to save it and rename it to .sh. Then you want to make it executable by typing chmod u+x filename.sh.

I made this file on my desktop and I just double click and run it everytime you need to get access to your network. I tried adding it to start up, /etc/rd.local but I believe that happens before the network is initialized and thus skips over the mounting step.

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. 05 Feb 08 | Reviews, Technology, Ubuntu, XPS m1210 | Comment (1)

Dell XPS M1210 & Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) – Installing aMSN 0.97 stable

If you installed the default Ubuntu package of aMSN through sudo apt-get install aMSN it probably didn’t let you actually run it after. If it treated you like it treated me, it’ll tell you to upgrade to the latest version. Here’s a quick little how-to on installing the latest version that I found on the Ubuntu Forums.

Here’s what you need:

TCL8.5: http://in.solit.us/archives/download/114664
TK8.5: http://chronos.solit.us/archives/download/113979
AMSN 0.97 stable: http://in.solit.us/archives/download/114530
TCLTLS1.50 http://in.solit.us/archives/download/115681

Install them using gdebi. You must install them in the order listed above and can uninstall TCL8.4 & TK8.4. Bonuses that PatrickofSpain include some extra skins, configuration tweaks and drag-and-drop into a conversation window for sending.

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. 04 Feb 08 | Reviews, Technology, Ubuntu, XPS m1210 | Comments (0)