Ubuntu: At times it's a breeze, at times it badgers

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

November 16, 2005

Breezing through Installation

I will say this much. True to it's name, this version of Ubuntu is a breeze to install. Unlike my usual reviews, I won't go into detail on how to install it. There wouldn't be much point, as the process really hasn't changed from the Hoary Hedgehog version. For the curious, I covered this last Spring in my review of that version of Ubuntu. This will give me more time (and space) to describe the steps I took to get Ubuntu running with the applications that I believe the modern desktop should have.

Ubuntu Adventure: In Which Breezy Badgers Me with Error Messages

As I mentioned, the Ubuntu installer, though not pretty, is certainly easy to use and effective in getting a basic system set up quickly. Once the installation is complete and you can log in, you've got a great "canvas" so to speak, that you can use to "paint" your own Linux system. But you need to be an artist with some skills. Ubuntu still isn't the equivalent to an easy "paint by the numbers" set.

First, I think any modern, usable desktop should have the capability to see streaming video. The most popular formats are RealVideo, Quicktime and (gasp!) Windows Media. But, since Ubuntu is a distribution that stresses the freedom side of free software, it means that you're not going to get these three closed proprietary formats with the standard install. You're going to have to roll up your sleeves a bit. This is where we're going to lose the "click to install" addicts. This, in many ways, isn't the fault of the developers of Ubuntu or of any Linux distribution. If content providers would switch over to Ogg Theora, which works amazingly well for the alpha-ish stage that it's in, then we wouldn't even have to talk about this. But who's using Ogg Theora these days? I think I'll save the proprietary format debate for an op-ed column. Let's get back to installing something to watch video.

Our best candidate is MPlayer Since this software isn't part of the standard Ubuntu install, we'll have to modify a file called 'sources.list' which can be found in /etc/apt/. What you basically have to do is get rid of the pound sign (#) in front of URLs that point to what are known as the universe repositories. These are servers that house packages outside of standard Ubuntu. These lines should look like this:

deb http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy universe

This particular server is for Canada. Now, I'm not anywhere near Canada, but these were the first servers that worked after trying several countries near me. Finding a working universe server was another little trial that I had to go through.

Before you actually install mplayer, you'll need the codecs to decode these stream formats. These can be found at their website At the time of this writing, the latest tarball with all the codecs is: all-20050412.tar.bz2. You'll need to create the directory: /usr/lib/win32. On Ubuntu, this is something you need to so with 'sudo', which Ubuntu uses in place of the traditional 'root' user or administrator account. The exact command is: sudo mkdir /usr/lib/win32. Untar the codecs and once again with sudo, copy them to /usr/lib/win32. Now we're ready to install MPlayer itself. Simple open up a terminal and do:

sudo apt-get install mplayer-XXX

Now, don't actually put XXX. You'll need to replace that with your processor type. MPlayer is optimized for different CPUs. The choices are: 386, 586, 686 for Intel plus k6 and k7 for AMD. You should also install the mplayer-fonts package:

sudo apt-get install mplayer-fonts

If you want to see video embedded in web pages, you should also install, via apt-get, mozilla-mplayer. I have to admit that I haven't had good luck with this on any distribution except MEPIS, which seemed to work automagically.

This will allow you to watch most Windows Media and Quicktime files. What about RealVideo? Installing RealPlayer was a separate adventure. After attempting to install it via Synaptic, a graphical front end to apt-get, I got version 8 of RealPlayer which, besides not being able to get it to work, is an outdated version. Undaunted, I tried to first install Helix player. Helix is Real Network's attempt to create an open source version of RealPlayer. I did:

sudo apt-get install helix-player

then mosied over to NPR.com to hear an interview with the newsmaker du jour and an error message told me I needed RealPlayer 10. Still undaunted, I went over to Real Network's website and picked up their all-purpose RealPlayer10GOLD.bin. When I tried to install it, it complained about not having libstdc++.so.5. In other words, I was in what many Linux skeptics refer to as "dependency hell". But I was soon given a reprieve from missing library land thanks to a chap named Richard Kleeman on the Helix community forum. He advised in his post to do:

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

I did this and I soon had RealPlayer running. Despite seeing a few more error messages, I got to hear the interview on NPR.com.

I also had similar gotchas installing a couple of other applications that just happen to be a tad on the proprietary side. One was Opera. In spite of getting a *.deb package (Ubuntu, based on Debian, uses this package format) from Opera itself, it wouldn't work. Again, searching for the problem on everybody's favorite search engine came up with the solution: Add the following to the /etc/apt/sources.list I mentioned earlier:

deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ unstable non-free

and then:

sudo apt-get install opera

did the trick. I had Opera. Again, like RealPlayer, I got some more strange error messages but it still ran. Opera isn't crucial to a desktop system, but it seems to use fewer resources than Firefox, which comes in the standard Ubuntu install. Another instance where Linux skeptics shout: Gotcha! A Windows user would just download Opera and click and voilá, right?

As for other applications that are must-have for me, like the emacs editor, for example, I added those by using the Synaptic tool. You'll find it in the 'System' menu on the tool bar.

If you want to install other applications, you should bookmark the following website: http://ubuntuguide.org/ It has instructions for installing some popular Linux applications that are be missing from Ubuntu's standard installation. There's also a lot of other information regarding Ubuntu. The website is well worth a look if you're planning on getting the most out of Ubuntu.

My Marconi Moment

I took advantage of this Ubuntu install to take the plunge into the wireless world. I'm kind of a late bloomer when it comes to these types of things. Adding another network cable to the collection always seemed simple enough. After moving to another city, however, running cables all over the place didn't seem so easy or desirable anymore. I had just read Linux writer Tom Adelstein's informative article about setting up wireless networking on Ubuntu. According to Tom, this task had taken him less time than with Windows. Since I've never set up a wireless network on Windows, I can't verify this claim. I do know that setting it up with Ubuntu Breezy Badger was quick and fairly painless. I purchased a Concentric wireless access point and an accompanying Concentric card. The card happened to have the same chipset as the article that Tom had installed in his article, Ralink 2500. After assigning the wireless access point an IP in my local range, I proceeded to follow Tom's instructions and via Synaptic, I installed ndiswrapper, ndisgtk, ndiswrapper-utils and ndiswrapper-source. Next, I restarted the GNOME menus (killall gnome-panel) and like Tom, I was pleased to see the menu item for installing Windows wireless drivers. I put the CD that came with the card in the drive and clicked on 'Install New Driver' and found the Windows XP driver, an *.inf file, on the CD. I returned to the networking setup in the system menu and de-activated my Ethernet card and activated the wireless card. And it worked. Like Marconi so many years ago, I had received my first wireless packet. This easy setup of the wireless system really xalleviated some of the frustration I felt with the video codec situation.

Conclusion

Despite accentuating the negative a bit, I consider Ubuntu an excellent distribution and it suits my needs quite well. It's the most popular distribution at Distrowatch.com, so that means people are, at the very least, getting information about it. I've opined for some time now that Linux is about 99 percent ready for everybody's desktop. You'd think that with so much fanfare over Ubuntu, it would be at 100 percent. The fact that it isn't shows the slow progress we're making to put Linux on more desktops. People are still going to have to suffer a bit before they get the machine to do what they want. That means we're still turning people away. We can debate about free media players and open multimedia codecs all day, but the average person wants to install a system that is going let him/her get on the net and see all available content. Since Ubuntu can't ship with proprietary Microsoft and Apple video codecs, maybe we need to take a different approach to get Linux on more desktops. Ubuntu, though an excellent distribution for people who are comfortable with Linux already, isn't quite ready for the masses yet.

Michael J. Jordan is the webmaster of Linux Online. He can be reached at Michael.Jordan**AT**Linux.org