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
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.
Karmic PAE Kernal and 4G Ram, Wifi on 1201N
I recently added more RAM (4G) and a new HD (320G, 7200rpm) to the 1201N. This required re-installation of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic onto the 1201N. The installation went without a hitch- I had previously re-installed Window 7 Professional, and Ubuntu went in and found it. Ubuntu also correcly detected the 4G of RAM and install the PAE kernel, which allows the use of a 32bit kernel with the extra RAM.
The PAE kernel is working fine with the Nvidia ION drivers, suspend and hibernate.
I found more information about a wifi driver, and this post at the Asus forum has links to an actual Linux driver. Using this driver doen't require the NDISwrapper, but I have noticed that the wiki will not re-connect after suspend, which the NDISwrapped, Win2K driver did. However, I've been hibernating (due to the bad batter life on the 1201N) and the wifi works fine after a hibernate wake-up (which is decently fast, especially with BootBlaster for the BIOS).
The opening of the 1201N to replace the hard-drive is a bit more than just opening a panel in the bottom, but it's fairly easy, given you take your time in cracking all the little pressure-tabs which hold the top and bottom of the case together. The new HD and the extra ram are making Ubuntu much more responsive and snappy.
BloGTK – Using in Karmic
A nice GTK application for blogging is BloGTK. It's written in python and it's fast and a decent replacement for MarsEdit when not on my Mac (not that there are many choices for GTK blogging apps). The 2.0 release is available on LaunchPad, but it requires a few extra python packages to run on a fresh Karmic installation. I've outlined what you need to do below.
The BloGTK 2.0 tarball (itself a python package that needs to be installed as root) will install alright, but it won't run, instead you'll may this:
dillera@granite1201:~/Downloads/blogtk-2.0$ blogtk2
Xlib: extension "RANDR" missing on display ":0.0".
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/blogtk2", line 6, in <module>
from blogtk2 import main
File "/usr/bin/../share/blogtk2/lib/blogtk2/__init__.py", line 35, in <module>
from blogtk2.main import main
File "/usr/bin/../share/blogtk2/lib/blogtk2/main.py", line 22, in <module>
from gdata import service
ImportError: No module named gdata
- Grab BloGTK 2.o
- Grab Python GDATA
- Grab Python feedparser
In your shell, expand them, then as root run the installer....
unzip -d feedparser2 feedparser-4.1.zip
tar xvf gdata-2.0.6.tar.gz
then as root:
# python ./setup.py install
in both of the expanded directories
Finally you'll also need to have the python gtk-spell package installed. This is available in the repo.
# apt-get install python-gtkspell
Now you can run BloGTK.
dillera@granite1201:~$ blogtk2
Xlib: extension "RANDR" missing on display ":0.0".
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/gdata/tlslite/utils/cryptomath.py:9:
DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead
import sha
/usr/bin/../share/blogtk2/lib/blogtk2/main.py:63: Warning: g_set_prgname() called multiple times
program = gnome.init('blogtk', '2.0')
Pros:
- It is very fast
Cons:
- There is no way to specify new formatting types, what is available is just Paragraphs, Blockquotes, unordered lists (and this cannot detect multiple lines of list items)
- There is no image uploading
Alternatives:
- ScribeFire - a nice blogging app that is Firefox Plugin (it does image uploading)
Updating Nvidia ION Drivers on EEE 1201n – Ubuntu
Using EEEbuntu (9.04) on the new EEE 1201N with Nvidia ION? You may have noticed that the built-in gfx driver is crushingly slow. But you can grab the latest Nvidia Linux drivers (which support the ION) without too much effort.
Below is exactly what I did to my system to get this working. Do this as root.
# wget http://www.avenard.org/files/ubuntu-repos/ubuntu-repos.key && apt-key add ubuntu-repos.key && rm ubuntu-repos.key
# echo "deb http://www.avenard.org/files/ubuntu-repos jaunty release" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/avenard.list
# apt-get update
# apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.28-11-generic
# apt-get install nvidia-glx-195 nvidia-195-libvdpau
# nvidia-xconfig
# apt-get install vim
# vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf
-- [Change Mouse to /dev/input/mice]
# /etc/init.d/gdm stop
# rmmod nvidia
# modprobe nvidia
# echo nvidia >>/etc/modules
# /etc/init.d/gdm start
Reference Pages:
http://ptspts.blogspot.com/2009/08/asrock-ion-330-nettop-with-jaunty.html
http://www.avenard.com/media/Ubuntu_Repository/Ubuntu_Repository.html
Update: I also updated the BIOS of the 1201N to the latest version; downloaded from Asus website - you can grab it right here- 0318
- unzip the new bios
- stick it on a USB stick
- rename it from 1201N-ASUS-0318.ROM to 1201N.ROM on the USB stick
- put the USB stick in the 1201, remove all other USB devices
To update the bios- power off and hold ALT+F2 as you power on. The 1201N has 'bootblaster' which makes it difficult to do this (it will often just go right into grub), if you can't get the BIOS update utility to come up I suggest you get into the BIOS itself (F2) and then choose to disable Bootblaster then try the ALT+F2. The flash utility will load and read the usb stick and update the BIOS automatically, then restart the netbook.
Removing Blastwave from Solaris
Solaris on spac is a lot of fun, however, sometimes you need to clear the deck of all the fun and start fresh.
With blastwave (CSW) you install pre-built binaries for your system as regular solaris packages. Removing them using pkgrm is a pain if you want to clear blastwave off completely and start fresh. However, there is a solution.
I found the command over at glaasse's blog:
# yes | pkgrm `pkginfo | grep CSW | awk '{print $2}'`
Does the trick, and you can sit back and watch it happen. Be careful using the yes command and pkrm however.
EC2 and OpenSolaris with EBS
Using OpenSolaris AMIs on EC2, and wanted to use EBS... currently, Elastifox is mute on naming the devices (only gives examples for linux based device names) so I was looking for a read on Opensolaris and found this.
Picassa Upload Button for Wordpress
It's finally been done- ClYang has written the glue to get an upload button in Picassa working with your Wordpress (2.7.1) blog. This has been a requested feature for a while. There are plenty of solutions to share a picassa web on a Wordpress blog, but this is the first instance (that I can find) of building the upload button - which directly uploads your local photos from Picassa into your Wordpress blog, not up into Google's servers.
CLYang has clear directions, they work great and if this is something you are interested in, go get it. I've been using Picassa on the Mac now for a month or so, and I'm very happy with it-- so happy that I haven't even used the new iPhoto 09 yet.
Awesome image editor for MacOSX: Imagewell
I've been in search of a quick, simple and modern image editor for the Mac. For far too long I've been dragging around Photoshop 7, simply because I know I can use it to quickly do what I want. But what I need to do is limited. I want to resize and scale photos, add text (watermarks) to them and maybe overlay one or two. Maybe take a PDF and rasterize it to a thumbnail. I deal a lot with screenshots and adding hi-lights to them is about the most complicated task I ever need to do.
I've looked at the Gimp for OSX and recently Acorn (which seems totally alien to me- couldn't get it to do the most basic things) and have been frustrated, till today. Banging away at google I hit upon Imagewell. The people at XtraLean put this app out, and it is exactly what I was looking for (and it works fine in Leopard). It has a crazy price (free for basic stuff- and what it does for free is amazing) and is only $20 bucks to unlock the more advanced features.
It easily passed my acid test- I was able to download it without a bunch of questions and i could use it right away. I pulled in a PDF and was able to quickly resize it to the size I needed and save it out as a png. Very easy and intutive. Intrigued, I went back to their site and looked around the Forums and stumbled across their concise and short screen casts, which quickly illustrate the cool things you can do with this app. I think I'll buy this one and can leave Photoshop 7 to finally wither away.
MySQL Python driver building (breaking?) on 10.5
Trying to get my mysql environment setup on 10.5 I ran head-long into the mysql python 1.22 drivers breaking with xcode 3.
from _mysql.c:40: /usr/include/sys/types.h:92: error: duplicate ‘unsigned’ /usr/include/sys/types.h:92: error: two or more data types in declaration specifiers error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1
The fixed is coved over at the Ingels 3.0. fairly simple fix, but due to my complete lack of c programming skils, one that I couldn't have come up with on my own. But edit a few lines and it complies fine. Thanks Ingles.
Halo affecting our world
Desktop Tower Defense
Normally, I don't like little flash games. Even normal games, for me, require a delicate balance playability and strategy before I grow tired and bored with them. But I stumbled across DTD a few days ago and gave it a shot. A few hours later, I realized that DTD is so addictive, so engrossing, that it is nearly indescribable. There is a nice Tutorial that is worth reading, but the game is one of those dead simple games that can played over and over again. I've spent whole afternoons trying to best my score of about 5500.
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- Quanta convertible tablet hits the FCC March 11, 2010 Brad
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