I use Ubuntu Linux on my primary laptop, and on several other computers. Half our office now uses Ubuntu, the other half uses MaxOSX as the primary operating system. For many things, I think Ubuntu is now as good or better than anything available in Windows or MacOSX. In other areas, Linux is good enough. One area where Linux seemed to lag is for video. Netflix, rapidly becoming a must have service, does not stream to Linux at all. This is a significant issue for Linux users living in the US, where Netflix streaming is available.

When I first tried Hulu, it worked on Linux, but not as well as it does on Windows. But there was a reason, and I could fix it.

My main computer is a Dell m1530. I have an Intel Core2 Duo T8100 processor, and 4 gigs of Ram. The video card is very fast, and the screen has a high resolution. My monitor is a 15 inch monitor with 1920×1200 (16×10) resolution. My video card is the nVidia Corporation GeForce 8600M GT (rev a1) with 256 megs of video memory.

In Windows, I can stream video from Netflix and Hulu in full screen mode, with surprisingly good resolution. In Ubuntu, I can’t use Netfix at all, and Hulu did not stream the video in full screen mode. (This was true even with Moonlight-Mono installed as a plug-in for Firefox).

The problem, it seems, was that Ubuntu did not originally install or use the non-free drivers for my NVIDIA video card. I found this out when I tried to add some screen effects. After telling Ubuntu to install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, the video improved considerably for the Dell m1530.

Meanwhile, in order to view Netflix, which does not work at all with Linux, yet, I have now installed Windows XP on my Dell m1530, which originally came only with Ubuntu. This turned out to be more of a challenge than one would have thought, as it was hard to find the Windows XP drivers for the Dell m1530. Dell told me my computer was shipped with Vista, which was not true. I could only find the Vista drivers on the Dell web page, and while some worked also on XP, many did not. I was able to solve some problems by taking some notes about my hardware, including by using, from a Linux boot, the Unix command lspci, which lists many of the devices attached to the computer. I used this information to hunt for XP drivers on the Dell web page, or elsewhere. The whole exercise took quite a bit of time, but now I can boot into Windows have use Netflix or Hulu in full screen.

……….
Updates, for my m1530 with 1920×1200 screen.

Using the NVIDIA drivers in Ubuntu:

NBC.com: now works fine.
ABC: Some videos work fine. Others don’t seem to work at all.
Comedy Central: Works fine.
Youtube: Works fine.

The change in drivers made a big difference.

This week I purchased an Acer laptop from Micro Center for $299. The model was: Aspire 5516-5474. It came with an ATI video chip set (ATI Radeon Xpress 1200), a 160 gig hard drive, an 8x DVD, an SD reader, 2 gigs of RAM, a 15.6 inch LDC Monitor (16:9 1366×768), and an AMD Athion 64 processor (the TF-20). The installed software was Microsoft Vista, home basic. I installed Ubuntu 9.04* to dual boot. It worked without any problems.

The computer case is made out of plastic, and feels light for its size. At (the time,) $299 seems like a pretty good value. This is a slow processor, however. Amazon sells the Aspire 5516-5063, which looks like the same thing except with a slightly larger hard drive, for $448, so it pays to shop around.

One issue that I did not care much about concerns the Windows Media player. I had trouble getting the sound to work. But I had no problem using the sound for Netflix and other streamed video in Vista. In Linux, the sound worked fine, but Netflix does not work for Linux, yet.

Ubuntu 9.04 recognized everything, including the screen, the wireless, the DVD player, the SD card reader, etc.

* I have only tried the 32 bit version.

July 2011 Update. To be honest, when running Vista, this laptop was really slow, and not much fun to use. Even with a regular version of Ubuntu it isn’t that quick. But I recently installed Lubuntu 11.04, and it made a world of difference. The computer actually felt pretty responsive. If you have one of these laptops, definitely try it with Lubuntu.

Here is the CPU benchmark test for TF-20 processor: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+TF-20

Although it is described as an unstable release, I have found Google’s test version of the Linux version of the Chrome Brower to work pretty well, subject to limitations described below. I use Ubuntu 9.04, and installed the .deb files from Google’s web page for the early access release.

It took me a while to find the bookmarks (toggle using control-b), but I like the cleaner look with more screen that this approach provides. One issue for me will be that Zotero does not install on anything but Firefox.

On the down side, flash does not yet work, the plug-ins are not yet implemented, and a lot of forms on web pages don’t seem to work yet. So, it’s not finished.

Some time ago, I bought a Dell m1530, with Linux Ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed. I have since moved on and installed a few upgrades of Ubuntu. I am currently using Ubuntu 9.04, which I like very much. But I wanted to make the machine a dual boot with Windows, so I could also do a few things that Linux can’t do yet.

Yesterday and today I spent a huge amount of time trying to understand why Windows would not see my hard drive. I assumed this was a result of the Linux boot loader changing the Master Book Record (MBR), and I spend hours trying different ways of addressing this. But that was not in fact the issue. Instead, the problem was due to the hardware settings, and specially the fact that my SATA hard drive was set to use something called AHCI mode. As described in this blog post on the topic, older versions of Windows don’t have drivers that support AHCI.

I was finally able to fix this problem by entering the Dell Bio setup, and changing my SATA setting to an ATA emulation. After making this change, Windows XP had no problem finding my Sata drive.

This morning, when trying to remove a duplicate icon from the Gnome panel on the top of my screen, I deleted the whole top panel, by mistake. It is not obvious how this is fixed. Like most Ubuntu users, I looked at some forums. Even with the top panel missing, you can bring up the applications menu from Alt-F1, or run a command from Alt-F2. I started up Firefox, and found a solution offered by Harvey Muller, who, in helping someone else with the same problem, deleted his top panel to see how to fix it. His solution, which worked fine for me, is here:

Harvey Muller said on 2008-07-17:
That looked like an interesting problem to solve, so I deleted my top panel.
Reinstalling gnome-panel did not help.
Deleting ~/.gconf/apps/panel and rebooting did. Just logging out and logging back in afterwards should work too.
Here’s what I did in a terminal:
$ rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel
To get a terminal without the Applications menu because you don’t have a panel, hit Alt-F2 key combination and type in gnome-terminal.
Then I rebooted.
The default gnome panel will be restored, and you will lose any customizations to your panel.

This is not the first time I have lost the Gnome top panel, and the fix from an earlier Ubuntu install not longer works. I am somewhat concerned that many newer users who are not that familiar with Unix many find this a hard thing to fix. I think Gnome or Ubuntu might have some type of recovery script or program in the main menu to do deal with these type of issues.

Today I installed a Linux version of tweetdeck, specifically for a Ubuntu 8.10 version of Linux. First step was to install Adobe Air: http://get.adobe.com/air/ Adobe knew I wanted a Linux version, and downloaded the install program to my computer.

[additional instructions added upon request] I found it necessary to open a terminal, and use the command line to finish the install. After opening the default terminal program (from Applications/Accessories menu), I used the command line to change the directory to the place where the install program was located. I then had to make the installer executable, using this command in the terminal: sudo chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

To run the install program, I next used this command from the terminal command line:
sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

The installation program worked ok, installing the files in /opt/Adobe AIR

Next I had to download a copy of tweetdeck, from here: http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/. For some reason, the first time I tried, the download button did not work, but I was able to look at the web page source code to get the URL for the download. But the second time I tried, it worked the way it was supposed to. I’m not sure why the experience was different the second time, unless it was that Adobe Air was not yet running the first time. In any case, I was unsure how to install tweetdeck, but after searching for some answers, I went to the Air directory: /opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0, and ran the application installation script, which asked me for the location of the application to install, and then worked well. However, it turns out it would have been much easier if I had realized that the Adobe Air Applications Installer is now on my Ubuntu Applications/Accessories menu. It turns out that is also the location of the menu entry for tweetdeck.

In any case, tweetdeck seems to be more functional and attractive than Twitux, and easier to configure and use than some other Ubuntu Twitter clients I have tried.

I subsequently installed two other Air clients, including DestroyTwitter and Twhirl. I was able to install both directly from the web pages of the publishers, and both installed menu icons in Applications/Accessories. Both worked fine.

I just installed Ubuntu 9.04, beta, on a Dell M1530. The install program asked if I wanted a dual boot configuration with the older 8.10 version, and I said yes. That resulted in a longer install, but it worked fine. Then I was asked if I wanted to migrate my data settings from the older partition. This was a nice option, but since I didn’t have much on the older partition, I couldn’t evaluate how well it works.

I did notice right away the cursor worked fine, without having to tweak the grub loading commands, as was necessary for the m1530 for Ubuntu 8.10. Open Office 3.0 is also supported, which is a good reason to consider upgrading when the final version is ready.

I turned on the “partner” repositories, and installed the “Ubuntu restricted-extras” packages, which I highly recommend.

I next went to www.medibuntu.org, and followed the directions for adding the medibuntu repositories.

I installed Cheese to see if the webcam worked, and it did, without any problems. More important for me, I used the Synaptic Package Manager, to install Skype, which I tested with a USB Logitech headset and also a USB VOIP phone. Skype recognized and used both devices without any problems. The voice quality from the USB Logitech headset was particularly good, which show shows the value of a good microphone. It also found and worked well with the m1530 webcam. The built-in webcam seems to work quite a bit better with skype than with cheese.

So far, the beta version looks pretty polished, and it works better on this machine than did final 8.04 or 8.10 releases.

The Dell XPS m1530 is in some ways a nicely designed machine. Mine has a very high resolution screen 15.4 inch screen, 1920 x 1200 (16:10), and a fast NVIDIA video card. It has a fingerprint reader you can configure for log-in, an SD/MMC (8 in 1 they claim) memory card reader, built in web cam and microphone, bluetooth and lots of I/O, including HMDI and S-Video for video. It is also pretty light, and has a decent keyboard.

Despite all of this, right now I am using my older Dell 1420n, which is heavier, and has a smaller, but still pretty decent screen. The reason I switched back was that when using Ubuntu 8.10, the m1530 was not as dependable as the 1420n when I used suspend. And even more important, the battery life for the m1530 has been terrible for me, and this is a big deal when I travel.

If I can resolve the battery issue, I would probably switch back to the XPS m1530. But for now, I am more comfortable using the older laptop.

I can’t say much for the name, and the appearance isn’t great, but Twitux seems like a serviceable Twitter client for Gnome based Linux distribution. I have found Twibble for Blackberry to work fine.

Like many others, I have had considerable difficulty getting the internal microphone to work, or even one that uses the front microphone jack, on a Dell Inspiron 1420n, currently using Ubuntu 8.10. I found, however, that USB microphones seem to work quite well. A Logitech USB Headset worked fine, as did an older USB VOIP phone I had laying around, both with quite good sound quality.