The Syncing Apple An Exploration of Technology and Devices

Flash 10.1 Beta2 plugin for Chrome Browser in Karmic

So if you have the 1201N you really should have the Flash 10.1 Beta2 plugin, which supports the ION chip in your Netbook and plays back flash video content near flawlessly and with minimal CPU overhead.

After you download the flash beta, you extract it and run a simple installer from a shell that wants to know the lib dir of your browser. It won't recognize Chrome's installation dir (in /opt/google) and so it' won't install directly to Chrome, but you can install for Firefox first and just copy the player over to Chrome.

Running the Flash Player installer, it will ask:


Please enter the installation path of the Mozilla, Netscape,
or Opera browser (i.e., /usr/lib/mozilla):


For the Karmic Firefox 3.5.x you would use:

/usr/lib/firefox-3.5.7

and the installer will install the player into
/usr/lib/firefox-3.5.7/plugins/libflashplayer.so

Chrome

To get this to work in Google Chrome, you need to do a few manual steps.

First, copy the flashplayer from the FF installation into /opt/google/chrome/plugins (you may need to create the dir):


# mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins
# cp /usr/lib/firefox-3.5.7/plugins/libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins


Then you have to make sure the Nautilus Launcher launches Chrome while telling it to check for plugins:

[RIGHT-CLICK]Applications/Edit Menus
Select Internet/Chrome, click on the Properties button

add the text --enable-plugins between the chrome and the %U.

Now close eveything and then launch Chrome from the Applications/Internet/Chrome menu.

Here is Hulu:

And there you go, Flash with accelerated ION video in Chrome.

Source: HowtoForge

ION, Xinerama, Xwindows and Multiple Monitors on 1201N

The EEE 1201N has both a VGA as well as HDMI out. In X on Ubuntu Karmic I wanted to start with just using the VGA to connect to an extra panel I have. It's older and doesn't have HDMI. There were just two issues with this however.

1. The Nvidia Control Panel in Karmic couldn't parse the xorg.conf file that was built by the Karmic installation process (and was working fine as best I could tell).

To resolve this, I had to run (as root) the nvidia-xconfig app which wrote out a more complete and parseable conf file for me. I had to logout and back in to restart xwindows (and now I see the Nvidia splash-screen)

Next, since I was running the Nvidia Control Panel as my user it wasn't able to write out the new xorg.conf file that it wanted to write (which had my 2nd monitor enabled and postitioned where I wanted it). Simply writing this file to /tmp and then moving it over via the shell worked. I had to logout and back in. But now my 2nd monitor worked! And I enabled Xinerama on this monitor.

Xinerama is an nice extention to have, it makes the extra monitors act like you'd expect them to coming from XP or a Macintosh- that is, you can freely drag and drop apps across monitors, and the multiple desktops spann the multiple monitors.

About Xinerama & Twinview

From Nvidia.com:

The NVIDIA Linux Driver supports GLX when Xinerama is enabled on similar GPUs. The Xinerama extension takes multiple physical X screens (possibly spanning multiple GPUs), and binds them into one logical X screen. This allows windows to be dragged between GPUs and to span across multiple GPUs. The NVIDIA driver supports hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering across all NVIDIA GPUs when Xinerama is enabled.

There is more info about Xinerama and Twinview at Phoronix.