Ubuntu 9.04 – Jaunty Jackalope AMD64 (64 bit)

I’ve finally made the jump and using the AMD64 version of Ubuntu as my primary installation.  There are a couple of tricky things to deal with, primarily with closed sourced applications such as Adobe Flash Plugin and Skype which are two applications I need to use.

How to install Adobe Flash Plugin 64 Bit for Ubuntu 9.04

A lot of the tutorials/guides online will tell you to use nspluginwrapper or similar.  Adobe has released an ‘alpha’ version of their 64 bit player which is pretty stable so far…

Download it from :-http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Unpack the archive and copy the only file to the Firefox plugins folder in ‘/usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins‘ :-

sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins

How to install Skype 64 bit for Ubuntu 9.04

You would think you could just go to www.skype.com and ask for a download and it’ll be like the Adobe site detecting that you have a 64 bit system right?  Wrong (at time of writing).  Annoyingly that’ll just let you download an i386 package!

You could manually remedy this by downloading the AMD64 .deb package from :-
http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu-amd64

Everything else?

So far the respositories have been kind to me… but i’ll update if I run into any other troubles 🙂

Voila happy 64 bit Ubuntu’ing.

MChumby – Interface Design

Working a 70 hour week dampened my enthusiasm for the MChumby but I managed to scrape a couple of hours today to try my hand with HaXe + Flash to prototype the Chumby Interface.

Test of revised layout
Test of revised layout

A few interesting tidbits were learned from the experiments :-

  1. HaXe + Geany are great for developing flash widgets for the Chumby
  2. Gnash doesn’t render the same as Linux Adobe Flash
  3. Chumby renders the same as Adobe Flash
  4. Text vertical alignment in flash is crap

A bit of background and a demo video of the widget on the Chumby after the break.

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