Ubuntu Tips And Tricks

Fix! Can’t Play Full-screen YouTube Video In Ubuntu Maverick 10.10

If you installed Ubuntu Maverick on a old computer with Intel graphics chipset, you will find that you won’t be able to watch YouTube video in full screen, regardless which browser you are using. Apparently, the problem lies with the embedded Flash player conflicts with the hardware acceleration.

For those who are having this problem, here’s the fix:

1. Disable hardware acceleration

1. Open your browser and go to YouTube.com. Start playing your video.

2. Right click on the video and click Settings.

3. On the flash popup, uncheck “Enable Hardware Acceleration”. Click Close.

Restart your browser and play the video in full screen mode.

Overriding GPU validation

If the above trick does not work, here’s what you can do:

Open a terminal and type the following command:

sudo mkdir /etc/adobe

echo "OverrideGPUValidation=true" >~/mms.cfg

sudo mv ~/mms.cfg /etc/adobe/

Start your browser and play the video in full screen. It should work now.

Other options

If you are using Firefox, you can install the FlashVideoReplacer extension. It replaces the flash player with movie player and is able to play the video in full screen and in HD quality.

via Ubuntu Forum

Install Synapse in Ubuntu 10.10

It’s finally arrived. After weeks of leaking screenshots and juicy tidbits on a ‘mystery new launcher’ we can reveal what it is.

Called Synapse, the launcher is light, fast, zeitgeist powered and can do some incredible things thanks to tight Zeitgeist integration.

Why Synapse?

The idea for Synapse was born from a merging of ‘Sezen’ – which allowed a way to search Zeitgeist log conveniently from your panel – and the more familiar GNOME Do. A visually slick n’ quick way to not only launch apps but also give an easy way to thumb through your Zeitgeist log.

If we were to slap a really 90′s style TV Commercial slogan on Synpase it’d be: “Find anything. Fast.”

What does Synapse do?

I’ll let Synapse developer mhr3 explain: -

“It well… searches stuff… If you ever used Gnome Do / Quicksilver / Gnome Launch Box, you’ll feel right at home with Synapse, if not, the only thing you need to do is run Synapse (or press Ctrl+Space to summon it), type what you’re looking for, and Synapse will present you a list of items that match your query.
Once you found the item you were looking for, you can perform an action on it (and these are defined by the plugins you’re using). If you don’t like the default action, just press Tab and search appropriate action.

And besides this primary use-case, you can also browse recent items which were logged by Zeitgeist, in case you close a document by mistake or just want to hear again the music track that played a few minutes ago.”

Features

The default set of plugins shipped with Synapse are as follows: -

Applications – searches your desktop files
Banshee – allows you to play/enqueue music files in Banshee
Commands – runs any command (ie. “sudo apt-get update”)
Devhelp – search documentation using Devhelp
Dictionary – find definitions of words
Directory search – allows opening of commonly used directories
Gnome session – log out, shut down, restart
Hybrid search – complete Zeitgeist results by searching for similar files
Rhytmbox – play/enqueue music files in Rhythmbox
UPower – suspend & hibernate your computer
Zeitgeist – search anything logged by Zeitgeist

But thanks to the Zeitgeist integration pretty much any application can integrate with Synapse simply by integrating with Zeitgeist.

Download

Static screenshots don’t do Synapse justice, as the speed and lovely animations can only be witnessed in true fluid motion.

So why wait? Try it out right now.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:synapse-core/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install synapse

Once installed launch it from Applications > Accessories > Synapse

Usage

Just like GNOME Do and similar launchers Synapse is ‘called’ using the keyboard combination Ctrl + Space. If you have a different shortcut hardwired into your actual synapses you can change it to any combination you like via the settings menu.

Settings

As well as being the place to customize the keyboard combination for calling the launcher the settings menu also offers up a few extra choices such as whether it should start on login and what theme you’d prefer to use.

Can’t find the settings menu? Just hit the ‘pip’ on the upper-right hand side of the launcher.

Themes

There are four themes included by default.

Default

Dual

Mini

Virgillio

Which you use is entirely down to you: they all have plus points – Virgillio is the least ‘flashy’ and ‘mini’ is the most ‘bar’ like and default the least widest.

Install Google Earth 6 In Ubuntu / Linux [With Fixes]

For Ubuntu
1) Before proceeding, make sure you have the Multiverse repository added.

sudo apt-get install lsb-core

2) Install Google Earth package which will automatically create a Google Earth .deb

32bit:

sudo apt-get install googleearth-package

cd && make-googleearth-package --force

64bit:

sudo apt-get install googleearth-package ia32-libs

cd && make-googleearth-package --force

Monitor your computer with saidar on ubuntu system

saidar is a curses-based tool using libstatgrab library in order to gather information about your system state.

Among the displayed information, you will find networking interfaces state, mount points disk usage, disk read/write access, memory and swap usage as well as cpu and processes information.

saidar has been developped by the i-scream group, which also developped the libstatgrab library, in order to easily access information about your computer.

saidar is included in ubuntu dapper repository, therefore installation is quite simple:

sudo apt-get install saidar

Now that saidar is installed, you simply have to launch it from a terminal (console) by typing:

saidar

As you can see from the screenshot, you can easily get an overview of your system state as well as your hardware.

In this case, there is two network interfaces (eth0, eth1), two disks (hda and sda) and 8 mounted partitions.

saidar is a top like software which give you a pretty handy overview of your system.

Moreover, libstatgrab offers developpers an easy to use and powerfull library to watch the health of your system.

15 Linux Desktop Customizations

If you think Linux desktops are ugly, think again. Here is an awesome collection of 15 jaw dropping Linux desktop customizations made by users. I wouldn't mind calling them works of art instead of just customizations. They are that good. A good number of them include clever conky modifications. I haven't yet tried to emulate them in my desktop, but surely will, at least some of them. For now, just the screenshots and the source. Watch and enjoy!