Ubuntu 11.10 Upgrade

Just upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, and found that Flash was no longer installed or working. Fixed it by (re?)installing restricted extras, though I was surprised I had to do this since restricted extras was installed prior to the upgrade. Oh well.

Also ran across this interesting post on "10 things to do after installing Ubuntu 11.10". It's focused on a fresh install, and was written based on the 11.10 beta, but everything still applies and may be a helpful reference in the future.

Enabling DVD Playback in Ubuntu

Surprisingly, I've never done this before, but I needed to enable DVD playback on my wife's new netbook which she uses for her work. While I was at it, I also enabled it on my new laptop. We're both running Ubuntu 10.10 and loving it.

Because of Ubuntu's commitment to free / open-source software (and because of some licensing concerns), Ubuntu doesn't ship with the libraries to play mp3s, DVDs, or some other media formats. They are, however, freely (as in beer) available through the package manager / Software Center. Here's what I did to enable DVD playback:

1. Installed Ubuntu Restricted Extras from the Software Center (ubuntu-restricted-extras if installing using apt or Synaptic).
2. Verified in the Software Center that 'libdvdread4' was installed (it was for me, but you should install it if it's not).
3. Ran the following command from a terminal to install the restricted DVD decryption codec (thanks to the Ubuntu Help site for this):
   

   sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

4. Installed 'VLC Media Player' via the Software Center. This may not be required, but Totem (Movie Player) crashed a few seconds into playing a dvd before doing this. After installing VLC, both VLC and Totem played the DVD fine. There are probably some codecs installed along with VLC that fixed the problem.

There it is. Both laptops are playing DVDs without any errors.

Disabling Ubuntu Swap Partitions

When installing Ubuntu on my wife's new netbook, the installation crashed mid-way through... after it reworked the partition table and added the ext3 and swap partitions. Some trial and error showed that Ubuntu had trouble recognizing the intended partitions when choosing to install alongside Windows again (it tried to cram everything into the space held by the shrunken Windows partition). So in order to get the partitions back to where they were, I tried to delete the new ext3 and swap partitions. Unfortunately, when booting to the Ubuntu Live USB stick, it mounted the swap partition on the main hard drive and prevented me from deleting it! Some googling showed me that I could force-disable all swap partitions via the command-line:

sudo swapoff -a

When running as the Live disk's default 'ubuntu' user, there is no password so there's no password prompt.

Turning off Bluetooth by Default in Ubuntu

The Ubuntu 10.10 install on my new laptop turns on the Bluetooth adapter by default, which is a minor battery drain. Since I rarely (if ever) use any Bluetooth devices, I'd rather turn off the adapter by default. Unfortunately, this is not as simple as changing an option in the Bluetooth panel application and requires some minor command-line tweakage.

Per this helpful post on the Ubuntu forums, I just had to edit the file '/etc/init.d/rc.local':

sudo vim /etc/init.d/rc.local

And add the following line:

rfkill block bluetooth

Although the post suggests putting the line at the end of rc.local, that didn't seem to work for me. So I added it near the beginning and all is well. Now, after booting up and logging in, the Bluetooth panel icon is happily grayed-out to show that the adapter is deactivated.

Configuring Ubuntu to Auto-Mount an NTFS Partition on Boot

I have a partition on a second internal hard drive that I use for media storage. Ubuntu is smart enough to detect it's existence and add a link in the Places menu to mount and open this partition, however I'd like to have it mounted automatically on boot so it can be accessible to my online backup software. I also want to make sure it maintains it's entry in the Places menu, so I can access it as easily as I currently do.

There are two administration utilities I used to accomplish this:

• NTFS Configuration Tool (ntfs-config)
• Storage Device Manager (pysdm)

Both utilities are GUI tools for modifying the '/etc/fstab' file, which defines the file-system table configuration. Both can be found in the Ubuntu Software Center, or can be installed from the command-line with apt-get (package names are in parenthesis). Once installed, both can be launched from the System -> Administration menu, as of Ubuntu 10.10.

The NTFS Configuration Tool is obviously focused on NTFS partitions, so it's not a general-purpose 'fstab' configuration tool. Before launching, make sure you don't have any partitions mounted or it may be unable to detect them properly. When launched, it will detect any new NTFS partitions (meaning ones that don't have entries in 'fstab') and ask if you want to configure them. When this happens, make sure that only the partitions you want to be auto-mounted are checked! Then click OK to add an entry for the checked drive to 'fstab', or you can click Cancel if you don't want any to add any new entries to 'fstab'. This leaves you at the main NTFS Configuration Tool window. If you open up Advanced Configuration, you'll see an entry for any of the partitions you just selected. You may need to check the 'Writable' box next to your new entries. From here you can Close the utility. Your selected partitions will be mounted automatically on boot, and they will still be listed in the Places menu! If you accidentally configured a partition, or want to remove a previous entry, you'll have to fix that with the Storage Device Manager.

The Storage Device Manager is a GUI front-end to modifying any 'fstab' entry, not just for NTFS partitions. When launched, you can select a partition to configure from the Partition List on the left side. If a partition does not have an entry in the 'fstab' file, you'll get a message box saying it hasn't been configured and asking if you want to configure it now. If you load this before running the NTFS Configuration Tool, then it should prompt you when you choose any of the unconfigured drives. If you need to remove an entry that you added with the NTFS Configuration Tool, you can do that here (be sure to Unmount first if applicable).

The only other thing I'd like to tweak would be to not have the mounted partitions display a desktop icon (I like my desktop as clean as possible), but I can live with it for now. And it's probably possible to use the Storage Device Manager to do all this (and of course I could just learn to edit the 'fstab' manually), but I haven't figured that out yet.