Shanktified!

The personal thoughts, opinions and typos of Ron Shank

Making Amazon Prime work with Ubuntu

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Amazon Prime won’t play most of it’s videos on Ubuntu. It was giving me an error about Upgrading the Player.  Most of this stems from the slow death of Adobe flash, I susspect.  But the reasons why are less important to me than the fix.. and thanks to the link below, it’s a very very easy fix.

Just enter the following in Terminal and enter your password and you should be good to go (at least I was):

sudo apt-get install libhal1 hal

Read the full post which has more things to try, if this didn’t fix it for you.  BTW: If this did work for you, please let me know in the comments below.

Windows 7: What happens if I just keep the trial?

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For those of us with a full cup of Windows Vista hate, the answer is to run to Windows 7.  The release candidate (RC) is out and I too plan to overwrite Vista with this as soon as I can get my head above water.   But this article from Lifehacker made me laugh this morning.  What will happen when you get the Windows 7 RC and fail to upgrade to the paid version?  At first (in March 2010) you’ll get a nag/pop up.  I’d expect that.  Then in June, you’d expect to be locked out, right.  But no, even funnier.  You can use it for 30 minutes. Then it auto-reboots – without warning.  🙂  Maybe it’s just me, but that’s funny and worse than a total lockout.  Like what you see?  Too ba(reboot).

It’s all fine.  They don’t have to give you a nag-free year to begin with. If you don’t want to pay for your operating system, then get Ubuntu (or some other flavor of Linux).

Amarok2: The Weekend at Bernie’s 2 of Software

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Amarok 1.4 WAS by far the best music player I had ever seen.  So many options, a great functional layout with nearly everything you wanted no more than a single click away… I did say was. My recent upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 automagically left me with Amarok 2.  Not only was it not playing out of the box, I seem to have lost all ability to customize it or control it.  They say it’s the future of media players.  Of course they do because, it’s sure not the present.  I haven’t seen a sequel this bad since Weekend at Bernie’s 2.  [Read more…] about Amarok2: The Weekend at Bernie’s 2 of Software

Only 2 minor hickups after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04

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I’m up and running with the latest Ubuntu release.  It’s an upgrade from 8.10 which was an upgrade from 8.04.. you get the idea.

Only two hick-ups so far.  The first, compiz boogered up on my leaving my Panels (or menu bars as some call them) not displaying properly.  I finally had to reset them back to square one.  Which is really easy to do, thanks to this post: How to Reset Ubuntu/Gnome Settings to Defaults without Re-installing.

My next minor problem was even easier to fix: Hide the drive and partition icons from my desktop.  Ubuntu question #2625: “removing icons from the desktop”.

I also had to reconfigure my compiz settings manually. Everytime I restored from the back up profile, it boogered up something again making me reset my gnome defaults.

If you are a Ubuntu newbie and don’t understand half of what I just said, please feel free to post a comment or check in the Ubuntu Forums.  We were all new once.

Don’t have Ubuntu or even know what it is?

Check out their website: www.ubuntu.com or nag me to put up a screencast of my own desktop.