A long time coming Adobe have finally released a 64-bit version of their Flash Player and it's for Linux.

It's in Alpha but reports suggest it's actually quite stable, so good news all around for us with 64-bit Ibex machines ;-)

• Adobe Flash Player 10 - 64bit Linux

You'll need to uninstall you're current Flash Player via either...

sudo aptitude remove flashplugin-nonfree

Or going into your ~/.mozilla/plugins directory and removing the old version.

To install simply download the tar file relevant to your distro, extract the plugin and drop it into your Firefox Plugins directory ~/.mozilla/plugins

Restart Firefox and you should be good to go,

Looks a non-starter but trying to find a way to enable video acceleration in Ubuntu.

You can list the hardware you've got from the prompt via:

lspci -v | less

From that I know my chipset's an Intel GMA 965, Intel one's are better supported so might be possible....

Doing this tells me I have direct writing 3d support enabled,

glxinfo |grep direct

Fusion-Icon may help,

sudo aptitude install fusion-icon

Allows you to switch between different window decorators (compiz & metacity), plus change some of compiz's options.

Sorted

Found a way to improve it, in terminal type

gstreamer-properties

Hit enter, this'll popup a dialog to alter the audio and video properties of your linux distro.

From here click the video tab and change default to X Windows System (No Xv), hit test to be sure, should improve the video.

You can also manage and test your webcam from here ;-)

When upgrading to Ubuntu Ibex 8.10 i've begun to notice that on shutdown the pc speaker beeps really loudly. Going into System / Preferences / Sound didn't stop this so i've found another way which is to add it to the modprobe blacklist file (which although in no way perfect does kill it).

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Then add this at the end of the file,

blacklist pcspkr

Save the file, close gedit then for good measure kill it once and for all,

sudo rmmod pcspkr

Harsh but should do the trick

Wanted to change the default splash screen on Ubuntu, thankfully found a good GUI tool to do this for me,

sudo apt-get install startupmanager

After changing your settings it'll want to rebuild the kernel and play with your menu.lst file (obviously), safest I've found so far but do use sparingly.

Open Terminal via Keyboard Shortcuts

Open System / Preferences / Keyboard Shortcuts

Now find the one called Run a Terminal

Click on the column opposite saying disabled and hit CTRL+ALT+T, then close the dialog

Now everytime you hit CTRL+ALT+T a terminal window will open.

Improve VLC + Keyboard Shortcuts

CTRL+CURSOR-UP  => increase volume
CTRL+CURSOR-DOWN  => decrease volume
SPACEBAR  => pause movie

Also don't install the XINE packages, GStreamer is much faster for video playback

sudo apt-get remove xine
sudo apt-get autoremove

Also if you've got a slow video card, try changing the de-interlacing mode in VLC to discard via VLC / Video / Deinterlace / Discard.

If that doesn't work, try changing your Appearance settings to Normal via System / Preferences / Appearance, then Visual Effects and select Normal. It's a good balance and you'll still get the cube desktop.

...also found this which suggests using the blend deinterlacing mode to improve DVD playback,

gedit ~/.local/share/applications/vlc-dvd.desktop

Scroll down and find the line reading...

Exec=vlc %U

Replace that with...

Exec=vlc --vout-filter deinterlace --deinterlace-mode blend --volume 512 %f