FFmpeg contains a number of tools to record, convert, stream and play multimedia content. The following tutorial will guide you through the installation of FFmpeg on either RHEL 5 or CentOS 5. I have chosen running on CentOS but it shouldn’t make a difference either way. Lets get started!

Adding the DAG repository

The first thing that you need to do is set up the DAG repository. This repository contains a large amount of very handy packages not available in the default repositories.

Add the following lines to: /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
[dag]
name=DAG RPM Repository
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

Now you need to add DAG’s GPG key. Without this you will get the following error message when attempting to use it with yum.

warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6b8d79e6
Public key for faac.x86_64.1.26-1.el5.rf.rpm is not installed

Import the GPG key:
rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt

This next step is not necessary, but if you encounter any problems you may want to try updating your system.
$ sudo yum update

Install FFmpeg

$ sudo yum install ffmpeg

That should be it.

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In some instances you may find that the default configuration of VIM has the backspace key disabled. Like many others I expect to be able to delete characters right-to-left like most other text editors. Unless you are doing some very minor editing, it quickly becomes a hassle to use the delete key.

Luckily there is a quick fix. Add the following line to the .vimrc configuration file in your home directory:

set backspace=indent,eol,start

You can change for all users by placing this previous line in the /etc/vimrc configuration file.

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Since 2004 and for what seems like forever in the technology world, the Linux kernel version has been holding steady at version 2.6.x. The first two numbers were unchanged for nearly 7 years and became largely irrelevant. The third number is the actual version of the kernel. The fourth number accounts for bug and security fixes. But this is all about to change as Linus Torvalds announced the first Release Candidate of the 3.0 code in one of his recent emails.

What will be the shiny new feature in this monumental version? Torvalds announced that the big change was, “NOTHING. Absolutely nothing.”

"The point is that 3.0 is *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We've been doing time-based releases for many years now, this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one ('20 years'*) instead,"

And he went on to say:
"But let's face it – what's the point of being in charge if you can't pick the bike shed colour without holding a referendum on it? So I'm just going all alpha-male, and just renumbering it. You'll like it,"

The official release is due out in about six or seven weeks and will be released near the 20th anniversary of Linux.

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Fedora 15 has been officially released and becomes the first major distribution to use the GNOME 3 Desktop by default. Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release about every six months.

New Features

• GNOME 3 Desktop – GNOME 3 is the next generation of GNOME with a brand new user interface. It provides a completely new and modern desktop that has been designed for today’s users and technologies. Fedora 15 is the first major distribution to include GNOME 3 by default. GNOME 3 is being developed with extensive upstream participation from Red Hat developers and Fedora volunteers, and GNOME 3 is tightly integrated in Fedora 15. GNOME Shell, the new user interface of GNOME 3, is polished, robust and extensible, and several GNOME Shell extensions and the GNOME tweak tool are available in the Fedora software repository.
• Btrfs filesystem – Btrfs, the next generation filesystem is being developed with upstream participation of Red Hat developers, Oracle and many others. Btrfs is now available as a menu item in the installer (only for non-live images. live images support just Ext4) and does not require passing a special option to the installer as in the previous releases. Btrfs availability has moved up a notch as a incremental step towards the goal of Btrfs as the default filesystem in the next release of Fedora. The btrfsck program for performing filesystem checks is under active development upstream with participation from Fedora but the one included in this release is still limited and hence users are highly recommended to maintain backups when using this filesystem (backups are a good idea anyway!).
• Better power management – Fedora 15 includes a redesigned and better version of powertop and newer versions of tuned and pm-utils for better power management. The tuned package contains a daemon that tunes system settings dynamically to balance between power consumption and performance. It also performs various kernel tunings according to selected profile. The new version of tuned brings several bug fixes, improvements and profiles updates for better efficiency.
• LibreOffice – OpenOffice.org has been replaced with LibreOffice in this release. LibreOffice is a community-driven and developed free and open source personal productivity suite which is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation. It is a fork of OpenOffice.org with a diverse community of contributors including developers from Red Hat, Novell and many volunteers.
• Firefox 4 – A new major version of this popular browser from the Mozilla non-profit foundation is part of this release. Firefox 4 features JavaScript execution speeds up to six times faster than the previous version, new capabilities such as Firefox Sync, native support for the patent unencumbered WebM multimedia format, HTML5 technologies and a completely revised user interface.
• KDE 4.6 and Xfce 4.8 – Fedora 15 includes new major versions of these alternative desktop environments. Fedora 15 also provides dedicated KDE Plasma Workspaces and Xfce installable live images that include these desktop environments by default.
• systemd system and session manager – systemd is a system and session manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements a powerful transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit. A related change is /var/run and /var/lock are mounted from tmpfs and results in a simpler, more faster and robust boot-up scheme and aligns to the default configuration of several other distributions.
• Dynamic firewall – Dynamic firewall makes it possible to change firewall settings without the need to restart the firewall and makes persistent connections possible. This is for example very useful for services, that need to add additional firewall rules including virtualization (libvirtd) and VPN(openvpn). With the static firewall model these rules are lost if the firewall gets modified or restarted.

• Download Fedora 15 at fedoraproject.org
• View the complete Fedora 15 feature list

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FreeNAS 8.0 has been officially released after being in beta for the last few months. For those of you that are unfamilliar, FreeNAS is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) server OS based on FreeBSD 8.0 supporting wide range of technologies. This releases is the first major release since development of the project was taken over by iXsystems. While this version adds support for BSD 8.0 and newer hardware, it takes a step back in the feature department.

From the official press release:
The release of FreeNAS 8 includes major architectural optimizations, a django-driven user interface, and ZFS - lending us some useful features like thin provisioning, periodic snapshots, LDAP and Active Directory authorization along with the most popular platform sharing protocols.

FreeNAS 8 retains enterprise-class services while eliminating some "Home User" functionality such as iTunes/DAAP, Bit Torrent, and UPnP. These features will make it back as third-party plugins at a later date.

It will be interesting to see if users want to upgrade to 8.0 with the loss of these “Home User” features. iXsystems move to productize FreeNAS might make business sense but they cannot forget their main home user base in the process.

Another thing is the absurd hardware requirements for the new 8.0 release.

According to the website, “A minimum of 6 GB is needed in order to have decent performance; the more RAM, the better the performance. If you have less than 6 GB of RAM, you should use UFS instead of ZFS. If you’re in a production environment, you will probably have lots of RAM and can benefit from the features provided by ZFS”.

Apparently long gone are the days where you can take an old computer, throw in some hard drives, and have yourself a nice NAS. This is the biggest letdown as far as I can tell. Home users might be better staying on FreeNAS 7 until these issues are ironed out.

FreeNAS Features

Web User Interface
FreeNAS 8 features a ground up redesign of the web user interface. No mess, no fuss – your server is easily controlled from any web-enabled device. Configuration is straightforward and simple, and you can make your changes on the fly.

Zettabyte File System
One of FreeNAS 8′s most important features is full support for the ZFS filesystem. ZFS includes data integrity protection, practically unlimited size caps, cloneable snapshots, automatic repair, RAID-Z, and more. ZFS is fully open-source, and is a great way to store and manage your important files.

Command Line Interface
FreeNAS 8 is based on FreeBSD 8.x, and will update and keep current with the FreeBSD project. So if you’re a savvy user, and prefer to use the command line, no problem! ssh in, and control your FreeNAS device from FreeNAS’ customized CLI.

Snapshots
If your data is somehow lost, FreeNAS makes it easy to restore from a previously generated snapshot. With the periodic snapshots feature, you can worry less about data loss, and use your system stress free. It takes far less time than a full backup, but a continuous set of snapshots will provide the same level of protection.

10GigE Drivers
10Gig Ethernet drivers are included in FreeNAS 8. If you’ve got onboard 10GigE, or better yet, a 10GigE card, FreeNAS 8 becomes screamingly fast when transferring files. This is especially noticeable for video streaming, and multiple simultaneous connections.

Backup and Restore
Remote Replication allows you to copy a snapshot to an offsite server, for maximum data security. This provides an excellent disaster recovery service, so even in the worst situations, you’re covered.

Thin Provisioning
Thin Provisioning is another excellent addition to the FreeNAS features list. Thin Provisioning allows the administrator to allocate users more space than physically exists in the system. When paired with ZFS, it becomes easy to manage your total data pool size, and quickly and effectively grow to meet your users needs as they use more of their allotted space.

File Sharing
FreeNAS supports many popular networking protocols, and is easy to set up in most home and enterprise environments. You’ll be up and running in no time, and your users can connect with the protocol of your choice, no matter what operating system they run.

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In an unforeseen move Microsoft announced that it will officially buy Skype for $8.5 billion in cash. Skype will now form the new “Skype Microsoft Division”, with Skype CEO as its as president. As the dust settles from this announcement many questions remain unanswered. What are their intentions? What is their business plan? And most importantly for us, what does this mean for Linux and Android support?

Steve Ballmer seemed to address this in the press conference:
“Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms”

“We will continue to support non-Microsoft platforms, because it’s fundamental to the value proposition of communications.

…fundamental to the value proposition of communications is being able to reach everybody, whether they happen to be on your device or not. And I think that, in fact, will be one of our competitive advantages, both for the Skype communications services, and in fact, for the devices as we move forward.”

This makes sense as Skype brings in millions of paying customers from platforms outside of Windows, so it is reasonable that they will continue to support these platforms.

A big factor for Skype’s success was that they were a neutral company and worked worked across multiple platforms. With Skype now aligned with Microsoft and their interests those advantages are now gone, and customers might decide to look elsewhere. Possible solutions include that Google Voice, Google Talk, or Open Source Asterisk. Unfortunately these services lack to total feature set the Skype customers have come to expect and depend on.

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ASCII is a 7-bit character set containing 128 characters and stands for the “American Standard Code for Information Interchange”. It was designed in the early 1960′s as a standard character set for computers and hardware devices. It contains the numbers from 0-9, the uppercase and lowercase English letters from A to Z, and some special characters.

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Intel announced a very important piece of semiconductor news in many years: the tri-gate transistor. The redesign of the 2D planar to the 3D tri-gate transistor is a fundamental change and will bring about big savings in efficiency and power consumption.

The tri-gate transistor is being produced starting at the 22nm manufacturing node and will be introduced with the upcoming Ivy Bridge CPUs. Intel will eventually include this technology in it’s entire processor portfolio from mobile to server.

The problem with the current planar transistors is that as they get smaller less current can squeeze through it. As the transistors get smaller the leakage current flowing through when the switch when it is off becomes indistinguishable from the current that is allowed to pass through it when the switch is on.

With the 3D tri-gate transistor above there’s a lot of gate surface area in contact with the semiconductor material. Because of this design structure more current can be transferred which the switch is on, and less current is permitted to leak when the switch is set to off. Besides being more power efficient this design creates a clear boundary between the on and off states. This allows the transistor to switch between states faster and gives room for higher clock speeds in future CPUs.

Intel claims that the 22nm tri-gate transistors can switch states between 18 and 37 percent faster than the 32nm planar ones (higher clock speeds). Alternatively the new design can reduce power consumption at current clock speeds by up to 50 percent.

Intel’s upcoming 22nm Ivy Bridge processor will use this new technology which is planned to go into mass production the second half of this year. This development will undoubtedly put Intel closer to ARM in terms of power consumption. Whether it is enough to push x86 processors into smartphones is another question which ramains to be answered.

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Google Chrome is an awesome browser and there are a few tricks that you should learn that make it that much better. Some of the coolest and simplest are text highlight for searching and navigation. Both of these tricks will save you an unbelievable amount of time, and they are only but a couple of examples of what makes Chrome shine.

Highlight Searching

Highlight a word or phrase and right click on it. You will be given the option to search Google for that phrase in a new tab. Pretty slick.

Highlight Navigation

Highlight a URL and right click. You will be given an option to navigate to that URL in a new tab. This comes in very handy when you encounter a web address that is missing a hyperlink tag. This can be a common occurance in many online forums or comment pages that don’t allow links.

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The iPod shuffle is a great little device but unfortunately it is buit to work with iTunes and comes with an almost undecipherable file system and database. Apple’s motives are clear here, buy a Mac and use iTunes. Fortunately for us you can save your money as there are a variety of ways to sync your Shuffle using some common Linux utilities.

Now it’s not all rosy, for some reason the iPod Shuffle support on Linux is shaky compared to other iPod models. This guide will walk you though all these problems and get your iPod Shuffle playing nice with your Linux system. This guide will focus on Ubuntu but these instructions will work with any Linux distribution out there.

Step 1: Initial Setup

If you have a new iPod Shuffle you can start here. If you are having problems skip down to the troubleshooting section.

Install gtkpod

Normally you have to connect your Shuffle to iTunes to setup the initial directory structure. gtkpod will handle this instead which allows your shuffle to locate and play music.

Install gtkpod:
$ sudo apt-get install gtkpod

Setup iTunes Directory Structure

Now connect your Shuffle to your computer and it should automatically mount to /media/IPOD or something similar. Start gtkpod.

Click on the New iPod icon and it should ask to create the iPod directory structure. Follow the instructions and choose your iPod model (Shuffle 2nd gen/3rd gen, etc.).

Step 2: Adding Music

Now that the Shuffle has the initial directory structure you can add music. You can use a variety of applications to do this.

If you use gtkpod or Rhythmbox they will work with the iTunes directory format and update the music database automatically. If you want to use Banshee or you want to add music using a file manager like Nautilus or Thunar you will have to download the shuffle_db program to update the database for you.

Optional: Download shuffle_db

This is a little Python program allows you to use the player almost like any other USB flash MP3 player. You simply copy MP3 files onto it using any file manager or application such as Banshee or Rhythmbox then simply run the rebuild_db program to build the music database.

Download shuffle_db:
http://shuffle-db.sourceforge.net/

Once you have downloaded the shuffle_db program rebuild_db.py, copy it to the root directory on the iPod Shuffle. Now you can add music to the root directory of the Shuffle and when you are done run the rebuild_db.py script to update the music database.

Execute the script. Your iPod my be mounted at a different location.
$ /media/IPOD/rebuild_db.py

Step 3: Unmount Shuffle and Enjoy

That should be it. Safely unmount your Shuffle and you should be able to listen to music right away.

Troubleshooting

The Shuffle is visible to Rhythmbox or gtkpod but no songs are listed

The permissions on the Shuffle are incorrect or the database is corrupted. This can happen if you have gone a long time since you last added music to your iPod Shuffle and there have been significant changes to your system (updated distribution, or updated gtkpod/Rhythmbox).

You can proceed in one of two ways.

1) Download shuffle_db program and execute it to rebuild your music database.

2) Remove all songs from the device and start at Step 1 above.

Clear the device. Be very careful here.
$ sudo rm -rf /media/IPOD/*

rebuild_db.py won’t execute

The iPod file system or the rebuild_db.py lacks the execute permissions.

Make sure it have execute permissions.
$ chmod +x /media/IPOD/rebuild_db.py

Try executing the program as root (be careful here).
$ sudo /media/IPOD/rebuild_db.py

If that doesn’t work you with have to manually mount the iPod Shuffle and execute the script.

Note: The following locations may differ on your system. Make sure that they are correct before executing any code.

Unmount the Shuffle.
$ sudo umount /media/IPOD

Create the new mount directory.
$ mkdir /media/my_ipod

Mount the iPod with a less restrictive umask. This will allow you to execute the script.
$ sudo mount /dev/sdb /media/my_ipod -o umask=0000

You should now be able to execute the script as root.
$ sudo /media/IPOD/rebuild_db.py

IPod wont play music, green amber flashing lights

The database is corrupted. You need to open Rhythmbox or gtkpod again, or rerun rebuild_db.py depending on how you added music in the first place.

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Canonical has released its latest version of Ubuntu today. Under the hood 11.04 Natty has made many controversial changes, first and foremost the addition of Unity which replaces the standard GNOME desktop. The new desktop was originally designed for the Ubuntu Netbook Edition but has now made its way to the standard version.

Beyond the introduction of the new Unity shell, there have been several other additions. The Gtk+ theme has a new slim scrollbar style, and the default music player in Ubuntu changed from Rhythmbox to Banshee. The Ubuntu Software Center has finally included support for posting ratings and reviews. This addition will make it easier for end users to make better decisions when adding packages to their system.

Ubuntu has been heavily criticized as of late for its increasingly closed development process, especially since it touts itself as being the “community” distribution. It’s often confusing design decisions and break from GNOME have done a lot to annoy many users as of late. With the recent release of GNOME 3 and Fedora 15 right around the corner Ubuntu has a lot at stake with Unity. I for one think that more diversity and choices are a good thing. Parallel development of GNOME Shell and Unity will undoubtedly spur innovation and will be a positive for both desktops.

The Open Source philosophy believes that freedom and choice are important. The big question is will the Ubuntu users support the new desktop and Canonical’s increasingly closed methodology, or choose to stay with GNOME and move to another distribution?

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According to the YouTube official blog post. All new videos uploaded to YouTube are now transcoded into WebM. To put that in perspective, nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day. So far they have already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on their site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM.

From the offical blog post:
To that end, all new videos uploaded to YouTube are now transcoded into WebM. WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term. As we work to transcode more videos into WebM, we hope to reduce the technical incompatibilities that prevent you from accessing video while improving the overall online video landscape.

YouTube will continue to support the H.264 codec and Adobe Flash player, but they are committed to developing their own HTML5 video player.

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If you have been using GNOME 3 and the GNOME Shell desktop then you will undoubtedly find this cheat sheet handy. Finding your way around the desktop without the help of a task bar can be tricky at first. While it is possible to use the mouse for each of these actions, GNOME Shell is tuned for fast keyboard navigation. Learning these keyboard shortcuts will make your transition to the GNOME Shell much easier.

GNOME Shell Keybindings

System (Windows) key: Switch between Activities overview and desktop
Alt+F1: Switch between Activities overview and desktop
Alt+F2: Pop up command dialog
Alt+Tab: Application switcher
Alt+Shift+Tab: Cycle in reverse direction in the application switcher
Alt+[key above Tab]: Switch between windows of the same application in Alt+Tab
Ctrl+Alt+Tab: Pop up accessibility switcher
Ctrl+Shift+Alt+R: Start and stop screencast recording
Ctrl+Alt+Up/Down arrow: Switch between workspaces
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Up/Down arrow: Move the current window to a different workspace

Keybindings can be viewed and changed from here: User Menu -> System Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts

For more information check out the official page:
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/CheatSheet

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Who couldn’t see this one coming. Since the acquisition of Sun by Oracle many people have been critical of Oracle’s handling of its newly acquired open source portfolio. In response to the the takeover OpenOffice project leaders and many contributers jumped ship and created a fork called LibreOffice under the umbrella of a European based non-profit organisation named the Document Foundation.

According to The Document Foundation:
"We believe that the Foundation is a key step for the evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the development of the code and the evolution of the project from the constraints represented by the commercial interests of a single company."

As LibreOffice continues to pick up steam the future looks bleak OpenOffice. LibreOffice has already begun releasing new versions that deviate from the OpenOffice code base. And to add insult to injury all the major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and SUSE will move from OpenOffice to LibreOffice in their future releases.

With the lack of support for the project todays announcement by Oracle comes as no surprise.

From the Oracle press release:
"Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis," said Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect. "We intend to begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office. Oracle will continue to strongly support the adoption of open standards-based document formats, such as the Open Document Format (ODF)."

Are we seeing the end of OpenOffice? And what does this mean for the rest of the open source projects that Oracle continues to control? One thing is certain, and that is that the free/open source model effectively protects community based software projects from exploitation from corporate intrests.

View the entire press release.

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3. GNOME 3 Featuring Gnome Shell is Released

April 6th is finally here and those of us who have been keeping track of GNOME 3 development, you know that means the release of GNOME 3 desktop featuring Gnome Shell. GNOME 3 and Gnome Shell are a dramatic shift from what users have come to expect from GNOME 2.

From the press release:

Today, the GNOME Desktop project released GNOME 3.0, its most significant redesign of the computer experience in nine years. A revolutionary new user interface and new features for developers make this a historic moment for the free and open source desktop.

Within GNOME 3, GNOME Shell reimagines the user interface for the next generation of the desktop. This innovative interface allows users to focus on tasks while minimizing distractions such as notifications, extra workspaces, and background windows.

Fedora 15 will feature GNOME 3 as their default desktop when they release in May. Up next in the release cycle will be Ubuntu and their Unity that will be the default desktop for their upcoming 11.04 Natty release. It will be interesting how the two compare as they share many of the same design elements and functionality.

Installation

At the moment you can download Live CD images for both Fedora and openSUSE but no distribution currently has it in their repositories.

If you are running Ubuntu and want to try it out as your default desktop, there is an article on how to build the latest version from source.

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Having the ability to hide the node title would seem like a feature that would be included in Drupal by default, unfortunately this is not the case. There have been a variety of suggestions on how to accomplish this task from creating a custom view to hacking the code on page.tpl.php itself.

By far the best way I have found so far is the exclude_node_title module.

http://drupal.org/project/exclude_node_title

The exclude_node_title module provides a checkbox on node-edit pages for easier exclusion, or you can use the admin page to manually enter a list of node id’s to exclude title. This module is available with Drupal version 6 and 7.

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In contrast to GNOME 3′s Gnome Shell, Unity is Ubuntu’s take on the next generation of the desktop. In a previous article I went into detail on to install Gnome Shell in Ubuntu 10.10, now its time to do the same for Unity.

There are a couple options to try unity on 10.10. The somewhat outdated Unity package in the repositories, and the latest daily build of the 2D Unity which lacks hardware acceleration. Unfortunately if you want the latest 3D accelerated version you will have to upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04 Natty.

Install the Older Unity from the Repository

The version of Unity included the the default Ubuntu 10.10 repository is 0.2.46. This is a fairly outdated version but it is easy to install and it will give you a good idea of what to expect when the new version is released for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty.

$ sudo apt-get install unity

Install the Daily Build of 2D Unity

You can also install the low-resource Unity 2D back ported from 11.04. This is the daily build so are getting the bleeding edge developmental version with all the latest features. The only real difference between this version and the normal 3D accelerated version is the lack of 3D eye candy.

To install you need to add the Personal Package Archive (PPA) and install Unity 2D.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:unity-2d-team/unity-2d-daily
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install unity-qt-default-settings

You can then change your default login session to use Unity instead of Gnome. Go to System > Administration > Login Screen and select Unity. Logout and log back in and enjoy the Unity Desktop.

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If you are using GNOME Shell with the latest Gnome 3 you may be wondering why you cannot Alt+Tab through your running applications. This is especially important since the panel and task bar no longer exists, making switching between applications especially difficult. To enable task switching with Alt+Tab you must configure metacity to support this with gconf-editor.

Hit Alt+F2 and type gconf-editor.

Now navigate to the switch_windows key binding.
apps -> metacity -> global_keybindings -> switch_windows

The default value is set to Disabled. Change this to <Alt>Tab instead. Now exit the editor and task switching should be enabled.

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The release of GNOME Shell and GNOME 3 is fast approaching. Unfortunately for many the latest build is nearly unusable due to the slow animation speed and lack of mouse responsiveness. If you have an NVIDIA graphics card you may be in luck as the fix is fairly simple. You need to change to the latest recommended NVIDIA drivers.

To install the recomended NVIDIA drivers navigate to the Additional Drivers menu.

System -> Administration -> Additional Drivers

You should have 2 proprietary drivers available. Choose the recommended driver which should be your second option.

Now restart your system and launch gnome-shell.

$ ./gnome-shell --replace

Your desktop should now operate more quickly.

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Installing Google Earth is relatively straight forward. Download the Ubuntu/Debian package from Google, then click on the package to install it. Unfortunately when you attempt to run the program you may be hit with the following error.

/usr/bin/google-earth: 43: ./googleearth-bin: not found

This occurs because Google Earth has a dependency on /lib/ld-lsb.so.3, and unless this library is installed it won’t run. To correct this problem you will need to install the lsb-core package.

$ sudo apt-get install lsb-core

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