October 5th, 2006
I formatted my Windows partition a while ago (needed some more space for some music) which means I’ve been doing everything on Ubuntu. Of course I have used Ubuntu for months, only booting into Windows once or twice for some win32 programming, but now there’s some finality to things.
I don’t miss anything from the Windows environment, except DVD playback support. This is due to some patenting issues in the way DVDs are copy-protected. Open systems like Ubuntu act like canaries to show how far our rights have been eroded, even when buying things legally.
Install libdvdread3:
sudo apt-get install libdvdread3
Install the decrypter:
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh
I also found Totem-Xine handles DVD playback better than using the gstreamer backend:
sudo apt-get install totem-xine
This worked, but the playback was a bit jerky. This can easily be solved by enabling DMA on the DVD drive:
sudo hdparm /dev/cdrom
Should tell you whether DMA is enabled or not, if it isn’t you can enable it by:
sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/cdrom
You can persist these changes for future bootups by entering it into the /etc/hdparm.conf configuration file:
sudo pico /etc/hdparm.conf
/dev/cdrom {
dma = on
}
Ctrl-X y
October 8th, 2006 at 12:17 am
hee hee… I STILL come back to read the stuff I know nothing about.
October 8th, 2006 at 10:38 am
Sudo is the program used to give administrative privileges to your machine. Apt-get is the program installer in Ubuntu. The bit after the apt-get is what program / library you want to install.
It’s quite cool as all you need is Ubuntu and an internet connection: suddenly a whole range of software is available just by using apt-get.