Installing Handbrake on Ubuntu 11.10

Handbrake isn't available from the official Ubuntu software repositories, so to install this handy video transcoder you'll need to make use of the Handbrake PPA on Launchpad.

Unfortunately, there's only snapshot builds for Ubuntu 11.10 at this time but it's still more than stable enough for daily use.

Handbrake 0.9.5 running in Ubuntu 11.10

Here's how to get Handbrake onto your Ubuntu.

~$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-snapshots
~$ sudo apt-get update
~$ sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk

It's as simple as that.

Chromium browser on Ubuntu 11.10

Getting Chromium (the open source version of Chrome browser) on Ubuntu 11.10 is just a few clicks away.

Search for Chromium in Software Center

From Ubuntu Software Center, search for Chromium and install. It's as simple as that.

Chromium 15 from the official repositories

Installing the latest stable build

The latest stable build can be installed from the stable PPA. It's been a while since Ubuntu 11.10 was released, so there should be a newer build available already but that doesn't seem to be the case at this time.

Adding the PPA would get you the latest stable build once it's available, so it's still okay to add it if you want to stay on top of things.

~$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/stable

~$ sudo apt-get update

~$ sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

Installing other Chromium builds

If you prefer a more cutting edge version of Chromium, there's always the Beta, Dev and Daily channels. Simply use the appropriate PPA line with add-apt-repository command and install/upgrade chromium-browser accordingly.

Links to the various Chromium PPAs are available on Launchpad.

Firefox 9 released

Mozilla released Firefox 9 with Type Inference for improved Javascript performance, support for querying Do Not Track status via Javascript, better Mac OS X Lion integration and lots more.

Info on other improvements available on the release notes page.

Ubuntu 11.10 is, unfortunately, still on Firefox 8.0 at this time. Maybe we'll get an upgrade within the next few days.

Can you run that game?

With so many games made for a plethora of system specs, it can get mighty tiring checking your computer's specs and comparing with the minimum/recommended specs for each of those games you'd like to play.

System requirements lab has a nice tool for checking your hardware for you. Just type in the name of the game you'd like to play and it checks the specs on your computer to see if it meets the game's requirements.

It runs on any browser, but only works with Windows.

Disable your screensaver while watching videos with Caffeine

Totem unfortunately doesn't support 10-bit encoded x264 videos yet. If you want to play those videos, you'll need to use a different video player than the default included with Ubuntu.

Gnome Mplayer works fine, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to prevent your monitor from going to sleep while a video is playing.

One way to work around that is to use Caffeine, a tool for disabling the screensaver manually. You can even set it to disable the screensaver only when certain apps are running.

Caffeine isn't in the Ubuntu repositories, so you'll need to add the Caffeine developers PPA:

~$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:caffeine-developers/ppa

~$ sudo apt-get update

~$ sudo apt-get install caffeine

You can run it using Alt-F2 then running the caffeine command, or search for Caffeine in the Unity launcher. By default, it shows an app indicator on your Ubuntu desktop.

Indicators with caffeine indicator on the left

It's a couple clicks away to enable/disable your screensaver from the indicator menu.

Caffeine preferences, System Monitor, and Gnome Mplayer running

Alternatively, you can set Caffeine to start automatically on login and activate when certain apps are running. It goes by process name but you can easily find that out from System Monitor.

Caffeine will disable the screensaver when it detects an app on its list is running, and re-enable it once all said processes are no longer running.

Epiphany browser going through a revamp

Looks like Firefox isn't the only one going through a diet. Here's a sneak peek at what could be a new UI for Gnome's default web browser.

Since Ubuntu's on a default apps selection rampage, why not consider a change of browser? I'm sure Chromium has a lot of supporters, and the new Epiphany UI looks pretty interesting too.

Epiphany looks to be aiming to do one better than the competition. We might not have any tabs at all. More correctly, there'll be a different way to manage and navigate through multiple web pages.

With the trend of increasingly reducing UI elements I'm sure somebody will (eventually) realise browsers should just run permanently in fullscreen mode. How's that for more screen space?

Convert those PDFs to ePub @ 2epub.com

2epub.com provides a simple (and free) service for uploading and converting PDF format ebooks to ePub format. That's not the only thing it does, of course. It can take quite a few other ebook formats as well (including doc, html, rtf, txt and many others).

The catch is it's limited to 25MB at a time, so large ebooks are out of the question.

Wine 1.3.34 released

Wine 1.3.34 was released days ago with changes to wined3d and jscript.

Here's a shortlist of some of the improvements:

- Bytecode support in JavaScript.
- Support for gradients in the DIB engine.
- A number of Uniscribe improvements.
- Fixes for DirectDraw mode switching.

More info can be found on the release announcement page.

More Windows apps should work (better) now but who knows? Regressions can (and do) happen. Maybe it's time to install a few of those old games you've been wanting to play...

Bluetooth doesn't work... again

It feels like the longer you use Ubuntu 11.10 the more "issues" grow out of the woodwork. This time it's the Bluetooth support.

This one's much more annoying than the other issues I've posted previously. It's been a while since I've last encountered issues with using Bluetooth on Ubuntu. About a year ago, I believe.

For reasons I'm unaware of, I can't find a device for pairing. Visibility's on, BT antenna's turn on. Maybe it's Gnome 3 since that's the biggest changed component here that I could think of. Things were working back in Ubuntu 11.04 so I'm guessing Unity doesn't influence this seeing how it's just a desktop shell.

Precise Pangolin Alpha 1 is out

Ubuntu "Precise Pangolin" Alpha 1 is released with the usual for a first Ubuntu Alpha build: mostly syncs with Debian. As usual, expect stability issues at this point in time and check out the known issues.

More details are available from the technical overview, but it looks like we're reverting back to Rhythmbox as the default after only a single release with Banshee as the default music player for Ubuntu.