Introduction

(note: this is an experimental document designed, at the moment, for my own reflections. YMMV)

So you've just finished installing the latest release of Ubuntu, 5.10 the "Breezy Badger", and you're ready to start being productive. Perhaps you are brand new to Linux, having made the switch from Windows XP or Mac OSX. Or maybe you've dabbled in other distributions such as Fedora, SuSE, Xandros, and Mandriva. In any case, if you're not familiar with Ubuntu's philosophy as it applies to the software itself, you may encounter frustration in your daily use of Ubuntu.

This guide will forever be a work in progress, a constantly evolving look at functioning with Ubuntu despite its often aggravating limitations. Unlike most guides that take the form of FAQs or procedural how-tos, this will be more of a journey, a series of encounters with day-to-day tasks that in turn lead to a better understanding of Ubuntu and, hopefully, to more a more productive, successful use of its offerings.

In the Thick of It

There's no beginning or end to this guide, so we'll simply dive in head first and hope the pool is deep enough.

Embedded Media

If you're a cinema fan like myself, you undoubtedly enjoy watching trailers for upcoming releases. One of the most popular aggregation sites for film trailers is Apple Computer's.

Click on one of the titles there, and select the trailer of your choice. After a few seconds, you'll be presented with a disappointingly blank media player, as shown below:

Try another. Same results, no? The media player (Totem) seems to load just fine, yet no picture or sound appears. So what's the problem? The Apple trailers are delivered in Quicktime format, which is a proprietary encoding for audio and video. You might be thinking, "So what?" And you'd not be terribly unjustified with such a question. After all, Quicktime itself is free to download and install on Windows XP and Mac OS X.

The problem is more complicated, as it turns out. Not only is Quicktime not installed by default, but the very infrastructure needed to support the playback of embedded media is not adequately provided in a default Ubuntu install. The reasons for such a state are primarily legal ones. For more information, please consult RestrictedFormats

For its multimedia infrastructure, Ubuntu uses something called GStreamer, which is still in its early stages of development, and is not sufficient for most people to get what they want from their systems. Another infrastructure commonly used instead of GStreamer is Xine, which provides better support for multimedia. If you follow the various forum posts and wiki howtos for configuring Xine, however, you'll still likely find that embedded media does not perform to your liking.

So what can you do to make sure that something as seemingly straightforward as watching trailers on Apple's website goes off without a hitch? The key is to use the MPlayer infrastructure, which has problems of its own, but provides the best viewing experience. As such, we'll be replacing the GStreamer infrastructure here with MPlayer, as well as installing non-free codecs needed to view much of the multimedia content on the web. (get credit info to forum)

First, we need to download the codec package. Click the link below, and save the file to your Desktop:

w32codecs

To install the codecs, open a Terminal window (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and enter the following two commands:

cd ~/Desktop

sudo dpkg -i w32codecs_20050412-0.0_i386.deb

Several messages will be displayed, after which the codecs should be installed. You may now removed the .deb file from your Desktop if you wish.

Now that we have the codecs necessary to decode the media, it's time to install the software infrastructure to use them. First, we must enable two additional repositories, as Ubuntu does not contain MPlayer by default. To do so, please follow the instructions in the AddingRepositoriesHowto.

Once the additional repositories are enabled, open a Terminal window (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and enter the following commands:

sudo aptitude install mplayer-586 mplayer-fonts mozilla-mplayer

These commands assume you are working on a Pentium-II class or higher system. Now we need to make sure that our web browser uses MPlayer instead of Totem for playing media. To ensure this, enter the following three commands:

cd /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins
sudo mkdir backup
sudo mv libtotem* ./backup

When finished, open your web browser once again and head over to http://trailers.apple.com. Pick the trailer of your choice. Now when you click on it, you should be happy to see something a little more pleasing:

That concludes this portion of our journey. Hopefully you are pleased to have functioning embedded media! It's my hope that future versions of Ubuntu will have better built-in support for embedded web media, so that the only additional requirement will be to install the non-free codecs.

Active Web Content

Like many people with a few moments to kill before a more pressing task, I enjoy playing the occasional game online. One site with a large selection of games is Yahoo!.

As an example, let's try to play a game of billiards. The frustrating result is shown below:

Like many applications on the web, Yahoo! Games depends on the Java Runtime Environment to function. Due to problems with licensing, Ubuntu cannot include Java support by default.

Fortunately, there are several ways to implement Java on your system. The easiest method, and the one we'll take here, is to simply install the Blackdown Project's version. To do so, first make sure you've enabled the additional repositories (AddingRepositoriesHowto), then run the following from a Terminal:

sudo aptitude install j2re1.4 j2re1.4-mozilla-plugin

After the packages are installed, you will be asked a series of questions. You may safely accept all the defaults and simply press Enter through them. Make sure you do accept the license agreement, however, before proceeding.

Now that we've got the Java Runtime Environment installed in addition to the plugin for Mozilla, let's give our game of billiards a try once more:

Success! Now we can play most online games that use Java, as well as other web functionality that depends on it.

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