Adding a windows partition to a Ubuntu only system

It’s now about 7 months since I got rid of winXP from my laptop and I thought I’d never need windows again.
I have just brought a new scanner, the Epson 4490 which is supposed to be Ubuntu compatible, but setting it up has proved to be less than straightforward so I have decided to add [...]

Using Skype in Ubuntu Intrepid

I have been trying to get Skype set up on my Vaio Laptop running Ubuntu 8.10 and I thought it would be straightforward. I was a bit worried that the Skype download page offered Ubuntu 7.04-8.04 as I’m on 8.10!
Luckily this did not seem to matter as the “.deb” file seemed to install fine [...]

H264 codec for web video

I have been trying to find out what is the best way to get a video clip onto the web and I have looked at the H264 codec. This seems to give much better video quality for a given bit rate compared with the older Sorenson codec I had tried.
I have used DVGrab [...]

Xubuntu

I have been trying out the xubuntu-desktop package today, and I’m actually pretty impressed with it.
To install it in Ubuntu Intrepid the command is:
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
As I have got quite an old laptop I thought I’d give Xubuntu a go as it’s supposedly a good choice for running on “legacy” hardware such as my [...]

Playing DVD movies with Ubuntu Intrepid

Intrepid comes with Totem as the default player but so far I have not had much luck getting it working (playing DVD movies) on Intrepid, but I think it worked on Hardy.   Totem comes with gstreamer by default and works with xine as well, but neither seemed to play the main movie, just the copyright [...]

Record from Last FM with Wireshark

I have recently started using the excellent rhythmbox player to listen to last FM but I have noticed that it does not seem to have an easy way to actually record music.   It will play music, but once a favorite track has finished there is no easy way to play it again which is quite [...]

East Berlin Apartments

This block was just off Alexanderplatz and it had obviously been condemned but I noticed that these interesting decorative bits has been added.
From a 5×5 print – Scanned with a Canon Lide60 scanner and imported into Gimp via the XSane plugin (os Ubuntu Intrepid)

Importing emails from Outlook to Evolution (Ubuntu 8.10)

About a week ago I accidently managed to zap my windows XP partition but I was not too worried because I did not really have any reason to need windows XP anymore.
The only trouble was that I had carefully backed up my Outlook 2003 data file (outlook.pst) but I did not have a copy of [...]

Firefox or Opera?

This is the default browser that comes with Ubuntu Intrepid and since I have been using it in WinXP for a while I have been quite familiar with it and know that it’s an excellent browser with good customisation and plugins.
I wanted to check what my blog looks like in another browser and as IE [...]

Scanning with XSane

I have been trying out a bit of scanning using a combination of GIMP, XSane and my Canon Lide60 Scanner.
I have got quite a few pictures from my recent trip to Berlin.   As they were taken with a Holga it means that they need scanning which is where XSane comes in handy.
I prefer the flexibility [...]