Resolving video play issues with Intel video cards in Ubuntu

Yet another hack to take into account when dealing with a laptop having an integrated Intel video card (e.g. Intel 945GM in my case): if you have problems playing video clips with the 3D accelerated desktop (Beryl or Compiz powered), then you may be running with a buggy driver.

There seem to exist a problem (see bug reports here, here and here) with XV support when using AIGLX so all media players using the default "xv" video output will fail or crash (including Totem and VLC). This is a big problem for the Gutsy users since Compiz Fusion is enabled by default.

The easy fix is to change the video driver from "intel" to "i810" — you can do that either manualy changing the "Device" section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf or, in Gutsy, from System / Administration / Screens and Graphics / Graphics Card / Choose driver by name.

Cisco VPN Client on Ubuntu (Gutsy)

I recently have been endowed with a company laptop and as such I was in a hurry to install Ubuntu Gutsy besides the usual suspect (read Windows). Good news is that everything has gone smoothly (or almost); bad news was that I couldn't install Cisco VPN Client, having the same issue as VMware Workstation — kernel module building was breaking due to changes in the latest Linux 2.6.22 kernels.

So after some googling around I found the solution — a neat patch which allows compiling Cisco VPN Client. Thank god the guys at Cisco were kind smart enough to give object/source code for their IPsec kernel module and not binary modules.

Ubuntu usefull non-free packages collection

Here is a easy way to install a big collection of restricted packages (either due to licensing terms or restricted by copyright) in your Ubuntu desktop: install the ubuntu-restricted-extras meta-package (either through Synaptic or from command line, see below).

You will get, among others:

• gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse
• msttcorefonts
• flashplugin-nonfree
• sun-java6-plugin

You can use the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Source: Ubuntu docs

VMware Workstation 6 and Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 / Linux kernel 2.6.22-9

Had a rough time trying to make Workstation 6 work on Ubuntu Gutsy — the vmnet-only kernel module was failing to compile. After trying a few patches flying around VMware VMTN forums, I was finally able to use the vmware-any-any-update113 tarball to fix the problem.

Procedure:

1. Unpack vmware-any-any-update113.tar.gz
   

   $ tar xvfz vmware-any-any-update113.tar.gz


2. Copy over the vmnet.tar file into your VMware lib/modules sources directory
   

   $ cd vmware-any-any-update113
$ cp vmnet.tar /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/


3. Run vmware-configure.pl

Good luck!

Digg this

Pidgin 2.0.1 (and Ubuntu repository)

Now that Pidgin 2.0.1 has just been released, the chase was on to grab another .deb for 2.0.1, but was rather enjoyed to find that someone has been thinking about an Ubuntu repository — add the following in /etc/apt/sources.list (for Ubuntu Feisty):

## http://ubuntu.schmidtke-hb.de
# wget ubuntu.schmidtke-hb.de/aptrepository.asc
# sudo apt-key add aptrepository.asc
deb http://apt.schmidtke-hb.de/ feisty main

Source: OShelpdesk.org
Digg this !

Suggested posture while at the computer desk

Washintonpost.com had published some images with suggested postures while working at the computer.

Microsoft fonts for Ubuntu Linux (and others)

In his "great" generosity, at the time they were trying hard to win the browsers war, Microsoft had released a pack of core TTF fonts with a lax license to redistribute them, for "interoperability matters". Times have gone, but the files have remained in various places on the web (e.g. project corefonts on SourceForge).

You can quickly install these fonts in Ubuntu with a command like the following:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

Now either re-login or use the following command to refresh the fonts list:

sudo fc-cache -fv

Tip taken from Ubuntu blog.

Chasing the Pidgin

Recently it came into my attention that the GAIM team has chose to rename the project to Pidgin and checking the new site I saw that Pidgin 2.0.0 release is available for download.

Unfortunately among the offered binary builds there was no Debian package for Ubuntu Feisty (that's what I'm running at work) and neither does the Ubuntu repositories offer a package.

So after some googling I found a few .deb packages (from which I chose one from download.ubuntu.pl). Installing the package, however, was a bit of pain due to the fact that I already had gaim 2.0.0 (beta7) installed and that was generating dependency issues: since nautilus-sendto is (wronly) dependent on gaim, uninstalling it would trigger uninstalling the whole ubuntu-desktop package.

Here is what I needed to do in order to remain with a clean package tree:

1. Forcibly uninstall gaim ignoring the nautilus-sendto dependency:
   

   sudo dpkg --purge --ignore-depends=nautilus-sendto gaim

   
   
2. Uninstalled the gaim-data package:
   

   sudo dpkg --purge gaim-data

   
   
3. Edited by hand the /var/lib/dpkg/status to remove the stale gaim dependency in the nautilus-sendto package
   
4. Installed pidgin package:
   

   sudo dpkg -i pidgin_2.0.0-1_i386.deb

   
   
5. Fix the packaging list (and eventually installing unresolved pidgin dependencies):
   

   sudo apt-get -f install

   
   

I must admit that the fact that the package database being a flat text-file saved the day — otherwise it would have been a tough day for me searching for a fix. Kudos to the dpkg guys for doing this the right(TM) way. ;)