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I have just reinstalled Ubuntu 64bit and i wanted to download some torrent. I like the default torrent client that comes with Ubuntu, but i missed the features of Azureus so i decided to give Vuze a try. Unfortunately this did not went as smooth as i would have expected, and this is because Vuze (which is built on the Eclipse platform) comes with the 32bit version of swt.

Here is a tutorial on how to install vuze on ubuntu 64bit.

1. Prepare install folder
mkdir ~/Applications

2. Download and extract Vuze
cd
wget http://cache2.vuze.com/files/Vuze_linux.tar.bz2
tar jxvf Vuze_linux.tar.bz2
mv vuze ~/Applications

3. Download and extract the latest 64bit SWT (you can get the latest URL from theEclipse SWT Project Page)
wget http://eclipse.ialto.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.4-200806172000/swt-3.4-gtk-linux-x86_64.zip
mkdir swt
mv swt-3.4-gtk-linux-x86_64.zip swt
unzip swt-3.4-gtk-linux-x86_64.zip
mv swt.jar ~/Applications/vuze/

4. Enjoy Vuze by starting it from terminal:
~/Applications/vuze/vuze

Adobe recently launched Flash Player 10 Beta codenamed "Astro". Great news, as it supports a bunch of new features, but as usually nothing yet for the 64 bit users. I'm going to show you how to get flash player 10 running on Ubuntu 64bit using nspluginwrapper. Before doing anything in the terminal make sure you close Firefox else you might not get the expected result.


1. Make sure you don't have any other flash plugin installed on your system:
sudo apt-get remove -y --purge flashplugin-nonfree gnash gnash-common mozilla-plugin-gnash swfdec-mozilla libflashsupport nspluginwrapper

1.1 To be sure we don't have any other old flash libs let's cleanup the folders where it usually resides:
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f ~/.mozilla/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -rfd /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper


2. Install ia32-libs and latest nspluginwrapper
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs nspluginwrapper


3. Download the latest flash player from Adobe Labs and extract it:
cd ~
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_install_linux_051508.tar.gz
tar zxvf flashplayer10_install_linux_051508.tar.gz
sudo cp install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
rm -rf ~/install_flash_player_10_linux/

4. Use nspluginwrapper to install the plugin and link it to firefox
sudo nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/

EDIT: here is how to install flash player 10 on 64bit systems for Liferea and Vuze

sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/




5. Start Firefox and type in the address bar about:plugins and press enter. You should get a result similar to this one:



6. Go to http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/index.html and test the new features.

EDIT: if you are lazy by nature, you can just grab install_flash_player_10_ubuntu64bit, a small script i put together. Make it executable (chmox +x install_flash_player_10_ubuntu64bit) and run it in terminal. It will kill ask you for root password the kill any Firefox you might have running and install the flash player 10

I have have just finished installing Ubuntu 8.04 64bit and I'm very happy with how it runs. That is without the exception of my Broadcom wireless not being detected on my HP Compaq 6820s.

I tried installing b43-fwcutter but that did not sorted the problem. It downloads the firmware but there seems to be something wrong with b43 and ssb modules. One of them, or both.. not sure, although i suspect ssb being screwed up from what dmesg shows. To get the darn wireless working I compiled from source the latest compat-wireless from Linux Wireless.

Here goes:
1. Install b43-fwcutter (select Yes when asked to have the scripts fetch the firmware)
$ sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter

2. Install tools needed to compile
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

3. Download latest compat-wireless tarball (http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download#Directlydownloadingthetarball)
$ wget http://www.orbit-lab.org/kernel/compat-wireless-2.6/2008/04/compat-wireless-2008-04-29.tar.bz2

4. Extract the files
$ tar jxvf compat-wireless-2008-04-29.tar.bz2

5. Compile and install compat-wireless
$ cd compat-wireless-2008-04-09
$ make
$ sudo make install

6. Testing the install
$ sudo make load

At this point you should have wireless working.

7. Make sure b43 module gets loaded before ssb on system reboot by adding the following to your /etc/rc.local file:
modprobe -r ssb # unloading ssb
modpobe b43     # loading b43
modprobe ssb    # loading ssb

8. Reboot. Your wireless should work just fine now :)

GIMP 2.5 came out and it has some interesting features. Since it is not available in Ubuntu's repos i thought it would be nice to make a detailed tutorial on how to install GIMP 2.5 on Ubuntu Hardy for evaluation purpose.

1. Install the packages needed to compile programs:
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

2. Install gimp dependencies:
$ sudo apt-get build-dep gimp

3. Make binaries, includes, libraries in /opt/gimp-2.5 available for use:

$ export PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/bin:$PATH
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/lib
$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/lib/pkgconfig


4. Install latest BABL and GEGL libs from source (these libs were not installed in step 2 as the gimp package in the repo is not depending on them)
4.1 Grab latest versions from SVN:

$ svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/babl/trunk/ babl
$ svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gegl/trunk/ gegl

4.2 Install BABL:
$ cd babl
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gimp-2.5
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ cd ..

4.3 Install GEGL:

$ cd gegl
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gimp-2.5
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ cd ..

5. Grab GIMP 2.5 tarbal here: ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.5/gimp-2.5.0.tar.bz2
$ wget ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.5/gimp-2.5.0.tar.bz2

6. Extract and intall latest GIMP:
$ tar jxvf gimp-2.5.0.tar.bz2
$ cd gimp-2.5.0
$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gimp-2.5
$ make
$ sudo make install

7. Enjoy your GIMP by running:
$ /opt/gimp-2.5/bin/gimp-2.5

The Ubuntu ackage for Transmission is outdated so i decided to update to latest. Here is now it's done:

1. Solve dependencies:
$ sudo apt-get build-dep transmission

2. Download souces:
$ wget -c -t0 http://download.m0k.org/transmission/files/transmission-1.11.tar.bz2

3. Building the Transmission release in the command line:
tar xvjf transmission-1.11.tar.bz2

It's great that Apple has decided a while ago to release Safari 3 for windows. It would have been better if they would have released a native version for Linux so that web developers that use this platform as their main machine can see how the sites they build look on the mac.

Fortunately we are able to run Safari 3 on Linux using wine. Here is a step by step tutorial that will get the browser working on Ubuntu 7.10

1. install wine (follow the official instructions http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb)
2.set wine's Windows version to Windows XP by  typing in a terminal

$winecfg

3. install windows fonts

$sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts


4. copy the core windows fonts to the wine install:

$cp /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/{Arial,Times_New_Roman}*.ttf ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/

5. download the Safari for Windows installer (http://www.apple.com/safari/download/)

6. run the installer using wine:

$wine Safari304BetaSecUpdateSetup.exe

6.1 next
6.2 accept the license
6.3 DO NOT!! install Bonjour and the Apple Updater
 6.4 done install
6.5 create a shortcut by creating the Safari.desktop file using your favorite text editor (make sure to use your real username in the path to WINEPREFIX)

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Safari
Exec=env WINEPREFIX="/home/<your_username_here>/.wine" wine "C:\\Program Files\\Safari\\Safari.exe"
Type=Application
StartupWMClass=Wine
Icon=e2f6_safariico.0

7. All done

Today i remembered that Blizzard is working on Starcraft 2. I'm a huge starcraft fan and i wanted to check out how the development is going, and when the game will be released. As no release date is yet on site, i went to the movies page trying to download a few gameplay videos. I had a very bad surprise. You can only download the videos using blizzard's download app. They are using BitTorrent technology to spread their files via a proprietary app. Why on earth didn't they just placed a .torrent file so that Linux users could also download their content i don't really understand.

Download Blizzard movies with wine:

In a terminal open the .exe file downloaded from blizzard with wine (wine-0.9.53 on my Ubuntu 7.10 machine)

wine 1280_StarCraft2GameplayVideo_EnglishUS2-avi-downloader.exe

This will open the downloader and ask for the location where you want the file saved.


That's it.

If you are an Ubuntu user you might have noticed that some packages don't get updated in the official repositories when software creators release new versions. Users who want to have latest and greatest installed on their computer face two options. First is to install the packages they need from some unofficial repo, the second is to compile the software from source. Although the 1st option might seem to be the easiest i'll show you that compiling your own packages is not that hard.

So, let's install the latest Pidgin package from source.

Solve dependencies

sudo apt-get -y build-dep pidgin

Download latest pidgin source (go to http://www.pidgin.im to locate the latest version. In my case 2.3.1)

wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/pidgin/pidgin-2.3.1.tar.bz2

Extract the source and compile

tar jxvf pidgin-2.3.1.tar.bz2
cd pidgin-2.3.1
./configure --prefix=/usr
make && sudo make install

That's it! Now you have latest pidgin installed :)