I’m probably wrong and everything, but last night I got an update of Firefox 3 thru the Synaptic package manager on Ubuntu Hardy and now it sort of looks like it’s out early.

Any ideas?

After the kr0w commented on my Ubuntu install post about the Emerald Theme Manager I had to try it out myself.

Installing

To get emerald and it’s dependencies do,

sudo aptitude install emerald

Enabling

Emerald isn’t enabled by default in Hardy, but you can enable it in the command line to try it out,

emerald --replace &

To keep it, edit the compiz-decorator file,

sudo nano /usr/bin/compiz-decorator

Look for the line…

USE_EMERALD="no"

Change this to yes, save and next time you boot you’ll be using the Emerald Theme Engine.

Keep losing top of windows?

After install Emerald and playing around with it I noticed I kept losing the top bar to my windows and corners, making things pretty unusable.

Found out I needed the Xgl Server which was missing in my build, you can check if this is the problem by,

compiz --replace

This runs checks to see whats available and the health of your compiz setup, mine told me I was missing Xgl.

Which was rectified by,

sudo aptitude install xserver-xgl

And a reboot, after which things started to work right.

Restarting X Server

If things start to break up you can restart the X windowing system with CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE.

Avant Window Manager

You can also get the Leopard-like dashboard by installing the AWN,

sudo aptitude install avant-window-navigator

This’ll really make people green with envy, however after installing that my double-tap issue came back with the touchpad, but that was quickly rectified by editing my xorg.conf file,

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

And adding,

Option          "MaxTapTime"            "0"

Under the options for the Synaptics Touchpad, after a reboot I was back up and running,

To install Skype on an AMD64 system, you’ll need the 32-bit libraries (if you’re distro is 32-bit, skip this),

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Then download the appropriate package from…

• Skype Linux

Firefox should download it to your desktop so…

cd Desktop
sudo dpkg --install --force-architecture --force-depends skype-debian_2.0.0.68-1_i386.deb

And you’re done, with the Webcam driver installed and enabled you should now be able to make video calls too.

• Ubuntu Webcam Install