I’ve been running Ubuntu Dapper Drake for several days now, but I had never bothered to plug in my speakers and see if sound worked. I plugged in the speakers and holy crap, the sound worked straight away without me having to futz around with anything! Nice.
Now double-clicking an mp3 file gives an error that there is no MP3 codec available, so I instantly think of Automatix which I’ve read about in the past few days. Automatix installs a bunch of stuff that doesn’t come on a stock Ubuntu system, including Skype, Azureus, Wine, Thunderbird, SwiftFox (an optimized Firefox) with a suite of plugins, Acrobat, Gnomebaker, Gaim, etc. And MP3 codecs.
So I head on over to the Automatix installation instructions page, follow the steps, and pretty soon I’m checking boxes for the things I want and downloading and installing tons of software.
I go and double-click that mp3 file again and ahhhh…sweet music to my ears!
I also have a zillion new apps to look at – tons of media apps, Skype, etc.
If you’re going to use Skype on Linux Skype Hijacker is a must or it will just end up giving you endless errors…
Hmmmm…. Thanks for the tip. I have finally managed to install Ubuntu on my aging second pc to my liking, and I can also say that it worked first time without a hitch – and including sound. Installing OpenGL drivers for the Geforce 4 was also a doddle once I discovered the restricted package. Although I will probably never find out why they have to be restricted in the first place…
Splendid, I didn’t think that there was going to be a version of Automatix for dapper. The breezy version was fantastic for quickly sorting out some little bits & pieces (Num lock at boot etc.)
Skype + dsphijacker + skype recorder. That was a nice setup.
Another alternative that is Dapper ready is http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/ – Easy Ubuntu. I ran that with no problems at all and it worked a treat. The only minor niggle I noted was that it doesn’t remember to mark changes you have already applied.(that may have been my setup though)
Thanks for the “heads up” and thanks for taking the time to drop by past my modest blogette.
Hey Phil Burchill, it doesn’t have to give you tons of errors, when I recently installed Dapper Drake, and then Skype through EasyUbuntu, I simply went to options, changed my sound device to /dev/dsp1 (my mic), it worked right away, i can talk and hear, pretty sweet.
I noticed that you listed Azureus, Wine, Thunderbird as easy to install with Automatix in dapper , while this was needed in Breezy , Dapper includes all three of those applications ( plus sun-java5-jre needed for azureus ) in the universe and multiverse repos now.
Just thought I would let you know.