Posts Tagged ‘ubuntu 11.10’

A Rant about Ubuntu 11.10

Every 6 months when Ubuntu releases I throw caution to the wind, click the upgrade button on my desktop, and leave, expecting to come back shortly to an awesome new operating system. And every 6 months it seems I don’t come back to something awesome, but to a whole collection of new problems. Usually it’s a whole collection of conflicts or broken packages. Sometimes the system won’t boot. Sometimes X won’t start or some weird new graphics problem pops up. It pretty much always leads to a fresh install. This time, however, things were different. With 11.10, things went smoothly and everything came back up nicely. That is until I logged in and realized all my GNOME settings were non-existent afte the upgrade to GNOME 3.

I don’t really have any particular loyalties or love of GNOME, I just used it because that was the default and tends to be the one that’s been polished the most by Ubuntu. While the new desktop looks great, it seems to have gone backwards quite a bit in usability. The integrations with Banshee/volume controls seem to be gone (or at least not working after my upgrade), menus are confusing and way too click-heavy, and there seems to be almost not configurability to the desktop. Even the new gnome-tweak-tool seems to have very little customizability. It seems over half of the customizations have to do with fonts and really small things that don’t matter to me at all. There are those who are passionate about fonts, but I am not one of those people.

Perhaps worse, there’s a new menu item under your username on the menu bar for “Online Accounts”. When I clicked on it, it brought me to a screen asking to give access to my Google account.. I thought maybe this could have some promise, so I granted it access to my Goolge account and it said that it had access to, among other things, docs (which I thought was going to be really awesome). However, nothing really indicated any next steps for accessing things. After poking around a bit and not finding anything, I did a quick search online to see if anyone could give any indication for what this thing was supposed to do. And, as it seems.. It does nothing. While I do enjoy a good technology preview.. I had to remind myself that this was an actual release. Ugh. I just granted access to my Google account for.. what?

One pleasant detail that I did thoroughly enjoy about the new GNOME is the OSX-style alt-tab/alt-~ app/window switching. Grouping applications and switching windows within the apps that way has been something that I’ve desired for a long time when switching back and forth. I know that most will probably hate it, but I’m a fan :)

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Filed under Rants : Comments (0) : Oct 26th, 2011

Enabling Flash in Chrome on Ubuntu 10.04

Update: The same steps seem to work on Ubuntu 11.04 as well.

Another update (10/24/2011): The same seems to work as well for 11.10. “Virtue” hints that the path may have changed to /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for me.

Hello again there, world. I’ve been away from my computer for a little while now as I relocated to Silicon Valley, but I got a chance to play around with one of the Alpha’s of Ubuntu 10.04 this weekend. The new version has some vast improvements in the looks over the last one as well as now it includes Google Chrome in the default repository. When I wanted to setup Flash for Chrome, I followed a handy how-to, but this one didn’t account for the fact that Chrome was installed via the regular repositories and wasn’t installed to /opt.

To install, I simply had to follow the step-by-step with a few modifications:

  1. Install Chrome and Flash (with the Ubuntu Software Center or with apt-get

    2. sudo apt-get install chromium-browser flashplugin-nonfree

  2. Add the Flash plugin to the Chrome plugins directory

    3. sudo cp /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/

  3. Restart Chrome

That’s it. While a bit annoying that one has to install Flash for Chrome this way (especially considering YouTube – another Google product – relies on Flash), but it’s not too painful.

If you still run into problems, you can double-check the location of the file (using locate libflashplayer.so) needed and the location where Chrome is installed (using whereis chromium-browser).

If you’ve just installed Ubuntu 10.04 and came across this, you may also want to install the browser Java plugin as well.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (23) : Mar 15th, 2010