Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Help! Help! I have purchased a HPC5280 printer and cannot get the following. A Scan program for scan to computer, a Disc Labeler Program. I asked at the retail outlet and was assured that it would work with Linux, and it does as a printer but that is all.

It is happening more and more. When I switch on the computer it makes the right sounds, and all the right "OKs" but ten the screen comes up blank.

 

There is not even the Unbuntu colour background, just a white light background.

 

I then go through the process of ctrl+alt+backspace and get Destop Open. Click on that and get ???Password...As I did not load Ubuntu I do not know the password and cannot find out, so I then go backspace again and get Options, I press restart and wait until the computer shuts down and loads again.

 

I expect there are a fair few of you who have bought one of those cheap MP3 players from The Good Guys or WOW. I know I have one which cost me about 30 bucks and plays half an hour of audio which gets me to work and back on my bicycle.

Just wondering if anyone can help this relative newbie to Linux. I have installed suse 10.2 on two separate machines, one Intel based which works fine,the other  with an Nvidia chipset. Am having all sorts of dramas finding and loading the correct drivers for graphics and sound.Can anyone help?                      

YouTube is great. It provides an easy way for non-technical people to share video clips. The downside is that it does so by streaming the video in a proprietary format. That's bad news for people with low-bandwidth Internet connections, or who want to avoid using proprietary or (depending on local laws) legally grey media players. Wouldn't it be great if you could download videos from YouTube and watch them at your leisure in a friendly file format? Well, you can using a couple of simple command-line tools...

While Windows, Macs, and GNU/Linux all support long file names (some platforms for longer than others), exactly what "support" means differs in each case. This article explains the differences and suggests some good habits to get into when naming files.

There's a bug in the non-free Flash plugin for Firefox (in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, aka "Dapper Drake"), which means you get no sound from the plugin. The bug was deliberately introduced because the brain-damaged way that the plugin communicated with the audio system made Firefox less stable.

There's a workaround to restore audio to the Flash plugin which, if proponents are to be believed,  does not have any negative consequenses. I've tried it and can testify that it works, for the moment at least.  Here's an abstract description of the workaround, and here's the step-by-step instructions for those that need them.

As everybody knows, I don't normally encourage the use of non-free software, but sometimes you need to access vital information in proprietary formats. 

Update: After a few days, I can say with some certainty that the above workaround is a bad idea. I've found that Firefox hangs after using the Flash plugin, and has a tendency to leave orphan processes (presumably the plugin itself) hanging around eating up system resources after you force it to quit.

Not just a file manager, more a way of life, Nautilus has a few tricks you might not be aware of.

I'm currently using the pre-release GNOME 2.14 (well, 2.13.99 or whatever it is at the moment) in Ubuntu Dapper, and just noticed the cutest behaviour.  I've never noticed it before, so it may not be in older versions, but on the other hand it's not the sort of thing I'm very likely to do by accident, so it may have been a feature for years.

Open several windows in the same workspace and hover your mouse cursor over the task bar (by default on your bottom panel).  Scroll your mouse wheel up and down and observe what happens.  Cool, eh?  Maybe not useful, but cool.  Try the same trick with the workspace switcher.

Anybody know any other non-obvious things you can do with your mouse wheel?