Friendly Tech Ninja Linux Howto's, Tech News & Reviews

26Feb/10

Howto: Fix Spotify sound problems on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

After installing Spotify on my Ubuntu 9.10 system I found that I was having some sound issues, popping, cracking and sound crashes. I'll walk you through my settings and point you to the Spotify FAQ for the suggested settings (they didn't work for me, but they could for you) So here we go...

26Feb/10

Howto: Install Spotify on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

I finally got around to trying Spotify, unfortunately they don't have a Linux native application so we'll be running the Windows version under Wine. The install process is very straight forward and most people have had it work straight out of the box however I had some sound problems which you can see here.

1Feb/10

Howto: Install TweetDeck on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

This is one of the best social networking application I've found out there, not only is it functional and stylish, but it's cross-platform as it's an Adobe Air application and it's really easy to install!

Note: If you don't have Adobe Air installed please follow this guide first and then return to here.

Step 1
Go to tweetdeck.com and click the yellow download button.

1Feb/10

Howto: Install Adobe Air on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

There are some really great adobe air applications out there especially one revolving around social networks such as twitter, facebook, friendfeed. This is a pretty easy install and I'm going to show you how to do it via the command line because it's very quick to do.

Step 1
Download adobe air here and save it to somewhere you can find it like the /Downloads folder.

Step 2
Open up a Terminal window under the Applications->Accessories menu and navigate to the folder you download adobe air to, in my case it was the /Downloads folder:

21Jan/10

Howto: Install Firefox 3.6 on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Update: The mozilla team has made a new ppa that will upgrade firefox 3.5, I've added that ppa below.

Firefox 3.6 has just come out and for people that don't want to wait for Canonical to officially upgrade the default Firefox 3.5 install on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala follow these steps:

Step 1

Go to System->Administration->Software Sources and in the Software Source window navigate to the Other Sources tab.

Step 2

Click the Add button and copy and paste the either ppa into the dialogue box:

2Jan/10

Howto: Use Symbolic Links to Sync Folders with Dropbox on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

I've been using Dropbox to sync files over multiple OS's for a while now, but I've always found it annoying that I couldn't sync folder I specified rather than just the one Dropbox folder. While my solution isn't quite what I want, I does a pretty good job of it nonetheless, this is done by using symbolic links.

Basically a symbolic link will allow a folder to be in two places at once. In my case I'd like to make a symbolic link of my /Documents folder and place it in my /Dropbox folder so it will be synced to my other machines.

Step 1

Open a Terminal and simply run the following command:

8Dec/09

Howto: Compile Dropbox from Source on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Dropbox
It's very straight forward to do and doesn't really take much time at all. If you're on another Debian based distro it should work fine.

Step 1

Download the source files from here www.getdropbox.com/downloading and unzip it (right click and "Extract Here").

Note: If you don't have a dropbox account sign-up for one here

Step 2

We now need to install the dependencies in order to build our install files from source.
Open up your Terminal and type:

5Dec/09

Howto: Install Adobe Flash 10.1 (pre-release) on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

As most linux users know Adobe Flash isn't particularly good, it's choppy and hogs your CPU. Well Adobe has a pre-release of Flash 10.1 which is really really good. It's pretty easy to install.

Step 1

Download flash here (Source).

Note: Download it to somewhere easy to access it like your Desktop

5Dec/09

Howto: Fix Gnome Do Home Folder Bug on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

If you've had a problem opening the Home Folder with Gnome Do, basically if I add the Home Folder icon to my docky or even find it doing a search, it simple wont open. Well I did some poking around and found a fix.

Step 1
Open up your Terminal under Application->Accessories menu and run the following command:

gksudo nautilus /usr/share/applications

This will basically open up your file manager as root so you can edit the Home Folder executable.

29Nov/09

Howto: Fix Performance of ATI Drivers with Compiz on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Everyone know's that ATI drivers always seem to have something wrong with them, be it tearing in video or just general slow performance.

I happen to be victim to both of these currently, the way I got around video tearing was by changing my video output as I outlined in my previous tutorial, Howto:Fix ATI Video Playback. As for the performance issues I've finally found the answer! It turns out that it's got something to do with backfill we don't need to know what it is or what it does, all you need to know is getting rid of it fixes performance issues such as slow maximizing windows and also should fix video tearing!

Caution: I'd like to warn you in advance that doing anything with xserver could make your system unstable and crash you desktop interface. So do this at your own risk!