a question answered: how to get flash to work in linux

EDIT: It has come to my attention the the adobe site linked to below does not have the 64 bit version of flash listed. This is because the 64 bit version of flash 10 is still in development. However a development release can be found here (it is all the way at the bottom of the page)

MIstergarrett asks:

I’m totaly new to linux. I used a little dos back in the day, but been on windows since 3.11. I got tired of bill gates throwing updates that just comprimise the security of my system. So I try Unbuntu. And I cant get it to do jack squat. No google vids no flash players no nothin, Half the crap they post on forums dont work. I feel like you have to been the one who wrote the program to get it to do anything, or at least be a software programmer. I’m sorry to say I’m starting to regret installing Ubuntu. Any suggestions on a distro for 100% complete newbies would be greatly greatly apprcieated.

Dos and linux are very very different so, sorry to tell you but, knowledge of dos will probably not be much use to you. A lot of people associate linux with a text interface (which is ok because a lot of geeks use it and we like text interfaces and in all honesty if you really want to get a lot of control of your computer you have to use it), but there is a gui too and the average user will probably not need the terminal too much .

I understand your pain. Forums are often a really bad place to get good information. Sometimes the best thing to do is ask a person face to face (doesn’t have to be literally face to face…). I find IRC good for this.

as to recommending a distro I’m not real sure I can help you out. most distros will have the problems you mentioned because they are free and things like flash are not.

However, it is pretty simple to get flash to work on your linux machine. Just go to the flash website. Now on the bottom it has a drop down menu and asks what kind of file you want to download. you can choose a package that will do all the dirty work for you and this is a great option when it works (which is almost never it seems). if you are using Ubuntu (or any debian based system) you will want to .deb (YUM for suse and .rpm for red hat/fedora).

This never seems to work for me so I just do it manually (which isn’t that bad). You will want to download the .tar.gz and uncompress it. this will give you 2 files: and installer and a libflashplayer.so. you should be able to run the installer and have everything go nicely and have flash installed, but that never works for me so I do it by hand (which is so stupidly simple that you really don’t even need the installer). just move the libflashplayer.so file to ~/.mozilla/plugins and restart firefox (you may have to log out) and you should have flash in firefox now!

please not that it has been a few weeks since I last did this and I am using Fedora so if it is not correct it is because my memory is fogy or just something odd with your system.

so back to your question about distros. I have heard that Opensuse is a good distro do beginners, but I haven’t used it in a long time so don’t quote me on that. You might also look into Xandros (formally lindows and linspire) I have not used it but I think it may be more what you are looking for.

Edit Oct 4, 2009: you may also be interested in Mint

Obama won.

It seems that almost without a doubt Obama as won the election. Only the next 4 years will tell if this is a good thing but for my part I think it can’t be worse that what we have had.

I can’t sleep

Hello internet. I can’t sleep. It is 2:36 in the morning and I have to be up by 7 to get to school… I’m not even tired. I have no idea why I am writing this except that I am very bored. If you are still awake leave me a comment.

President Barack Obama came to town yesterday.

Some of you may have watched Barack Obama’s speach yesterday (apirl 22 2008) after losing the pennsylvania primary but as it was a very short drive (20min drive and a long wait) I went in person. I took some pictures of the future president with my phone, because I forgot my camara, so I thought I would share them with you.

First you may be interested in a transcript of his speech or a video of it. The video isn’t great, but it is the best I could get from youtube. Its a recording off of a tv, there is a guy talking in the background and its only about half of the speech.

None of these pictures are all that great. (click to enlarge)

This is John Mellencamp. I’m not a fan.

Obama shaking Jonathan Weinzapfel(the Mayor), who gave a very similar speech this night as he did when Hillary came to town. I guess he hoped no one would notice.

That secret service guy kept walking in and out of the crowd (escorting a group) and squeezed past me several times.

This is a bad picture.

I seem to be getting closer . I think that is the secret service guy’s forehead…

Another bad picture but a bit closer.

I wish I had remembered to take my camera… If you live in Indiana(or any state that hasn’t had its primary yet) remember to vote for Obama!

Here is what I’ve been up to lately

Apirl fools

I was going to play some kind of joke on the three people that actually read this, but I’ve been busy. So, I present to you for your viewing pleasure wikipedia’s list of awesome april fools jokes. There are some really good ones; I especially enjoy the BBCs joke about spaghetti farms .

Site of the Week: a short essay and an open letter.

I kind of forgot to write this and I’m going to through it together now. Too make up for it I’ll give you two interesting things I found sometimes ago. The first is:

Inside the Monkeysphere

here is excerpt:

Picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if you wish. We’ll call him Slappy.

Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. You’d be sad if Slappy died, wouldn’t you?

Now, imagine you get five more monkeys. Tito, Bubbles, Fluffy, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is distant and quiet. And so on. They’re all your personal monkey friends.

The second is:

Why Can’t I own a Canadian

and an excerpt:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other specific laws and how to follow them:

When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord – Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

ok I’m out of time (stargate is about to come on). See you later internet.

site of the Week: None

Due to circumstances I have no intention of telling the fine folks of the internet I was not able write a site of the week tonight. I may have one tomorrow but don’t count on it.

Instead I will give you something that I forgot to put in my last post. I meant to talk about what one could do if one was forced to use a windows machine where one does not have permissions to change the keyboard layout. The answer DvAssist. DvAssist will change the Layout for you even when you don’t have permission to do it. The only problem is that since you don’t have permission to change the layout you can’t change it back with out DvAssist (It changes back and forth). To make sure its clear, DvAssit actually changes the layout in windows. It does not sit between you and windows and emulate a change or anything like that. It actually changes it. That means that when dvAssist is not running the layout will be set to whatever you changed it to with DvAssist.

I use it at school and it works pretty well. I do recommend using hot keys to switch just in case you need to switch in a hurry.

Switching to Dvorak in Four Easy steps

UPDATE: I seem to somehow removed step four while editing.

A few years ago (3 I think) I switched to dvorak. There are a lot of sites out there that will explain why dvorak is better than qwerty so I would like to focus on how to switched to dvorak and the problems you may experience if you do. But of course I can’t write a post on dvorak with you a little discussion on why it is better.

The first thing you will notice about dvorak after using it for a while is that you don’t have to move your hands as much. you will be able to type a lot of what you want to type without ever leaving the home row or only leaving it a few times. Bulhing on that there is another thing that you may not notice for a while (unless you already know about it); Dvorak is designed to alternate which hand you are typing with. So most of the time when you type a letter with one hand you will type the next with the other. I said this was building on not having to leave the home as often so you may be wondering how the two are connected. Well, here is how: when you have to move off of the home row to type a character the next key you have to hit will be on the other side of the keyboard. This means you won’t have to twist your hands in strange uncomfortable ways. There we have hit on the real benefit of dvorak it is more uncomfortable. If you do a lot of coding you will love dovark. All of those keys like / and aren’t shoved down in the corner or other strange uncomfortable places anymore! I know I said I would keep that short but I couldn’t help myself.

so now to the important part. How to join the cool crowd erm I mean switch to dvorak.

Step 1: change your layout in your os of choice and rearrange the keys on your keyboard
note:in case you didn’t you can pry of the keys with a screw driver and but them back on where they belong(in the dvorak layout that is). It won’t hurt your keyboard if you aren’t stupid about it.

Step 2: If you can help it use only dvorak. At first you will have difficulty typing because you don’t know where the keys are! thats why you changed the physical location of the keys on your keyboard in the last step. Give this step some time (maybe 2-4 weeks) you will get the hang of it eventually.

Step 3: Change the physical location of the keys on your keyboard back to qwerty, but keep your os set to dvorak. So you think after almost a month of using dvorak you know where the key are? can you do it with out the possibility of looking? This actually has some very practical reasons beyond forcing you to touch type (if you are a computer n00b and don’t know proper typing, whether you do it or not, this may not work for you). Keyboard keys are normally varied in height by what row they are on. When you move around the keys there heights will get all screwed up. If you ever have to use qwerty again it may be helpful to have it on your keyboard(you will probably forget how to type on qwerty after a while). If someone else wants to use your computer that doesn’t know dvorak and can’t touch type with qwerty they will need to see qwerty on the keyboard. As an alternative to this step you could get a keyboard without any characters on it(I want one) or if you really want to spend a lot of money you could get an led keyboard(I also want one of these) if they ever come out.

Step 4: Brag to your friends that you use dvorak and give them a link to this post so they can increase my views *cough* I mean switched to dvorak as well.

If you aren’t a great typer on qwerty your typing will probably improve with dvorak just because you are learning to type the right way. Some people say that once they switch to dvorak they can type faster. This may be true if you type slowly with qwerty but for everyone I know typing speeds did not significantly improve.

For more on dvorak check out Wikipedia’s article

I hope this helps.

Permissions in *nix

I often need to change permissions on files in Linux but for some reason have trouble remembering octal permissions. I hope to give a brief tutorial on octal permissions and chmod.

Many times when I need to chang a files permissions it is becaues I need to execute it. This is fairly trivial with chmod. All one needs to do to make a file executed able for himself is to run the command chmod +x ./path/to/file. Infact there you can to a lot more than just making a file executable with arguments. If you want to know more about that take a look at chmods man page, because I’m notgoing to cover it.

If one wants to change permissions for more than just himself or wants to change many things at once the easiest way is to use octal permissions codes (I’m sure thats not the right terminology). The syntax for these codes, with chmod, is chmod <code> /path/to/file. The codes are pretty easy. All you have to do is remember three numbers and what they do: 1 sets the file to executable, 2 sets the file to writable, and 4 makes the file readable. These numbers can be added to combine their functionality. 3(1+2) makes a file executable and writable; 6(4+2) makes a file both readable and writable. These numbers can be added in anyway up to 7(1+2+4). 0 sets the file to no permissions.

I said that you could change permissions for multiple people as well as just the read-write-excitability, but so for I haven’t said how. Well, its really quite simple. to change permissions for more than just one’s self one uses more than one number. Order is important, it can’t read your mind. You can change permissions for yourself, your group, and everyone else(no one in particular). So, for exapmle lets change a file so that I can execute it but no one else can. I would run the command chmod 100 /path/to/file. If I want everyone in my group to also be able to use the file I will use chmod 110 /path/to/file. chmod 111 /path/to/file would allow every one on the system to execute the file. So the order is user, group, other. Remember this starts from right to left so if you just use chmod 1 /path it is like using chmod 001 /path.

Hopefully this makes sense to someone; if not let me know in the comments. I did say I only hoped to give a tutorial, not that it was going to be a successful event.