Jaunty Jackalope: The Aftermath

Having installed Ubuntu 9.04, I now have to face the aftermath. As I discovered with the last upgrade, there are consequences and the first one that I've discovered this time around is that there is no sound when I play flash games or flash videos. However, there is sound for music and movies etc. Why this should be, I've no idea but my six year old granddaughter was not amused when she couldn't hear any sounds while playing her favourite Yahoo flash game this afternoon. I'm now under pressure to come up with a solution. I did reinstall some drivers that had been disabled by the installation and had been warned beforehand that "some 3rd party entries in your sources list were disabled. Reenable with 'software properties' tool or your package manager" (which I did). Maybe when I restart the PC tomorrow, all will be well. I doubt it however, and will probably have to begin the inevitable quest for answers. 

This little problem has been coupled with the failure of my laptop to connect to the home Wi-Fi router. It connects at school without any problem but not at home. For some weeks now it has been slow to connect when brought home from school. Initially, it would not recognise that a network was present but after five minutes or so it would and then the connection would remain stable. This latest trouble seems to be an escalation of these earlier difficulties. So far I can't see any obvious differences between 9.04 and the earlier version but I've really not had a chance to look around much. I'd also like to try to run a portable version of Ubuntu within Windows as outlined on this site. The download is 438Mb. so I might try it next weekend. I really do need to clean up the hard drive on my laptop. As well as having a dual boot system (Windows and Ubuntu 8.04), I also have two virtual PCs set up within Vista using Microsoft's Virtual PC and VMWare. I should just reinstall Vista and start afresh, after all the laptop is now two and half years old and it is full of all sorts of rubbish that I've experimented with briefly and discarded.

Ubuntu 9.04 - Jaunty Jackalope

I've taken the plunge again and begun installing Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope. I'd never heard of a Jackalope but apparently it's a portmanteau of jackrabbit and antelope, an imaginary creature that nonetheless makes regular appearances in popular culture (see Wikipedia article). Even though it's just been released, the OS is getting favourable reviews so it will be interesting to test it out.

Recently I have been experiencing some strange problems with video downloads from YouTube. The downloads would play in Ubuntu but not in Windows. This occurred using both DownloadHelper and FlashGot plugins for the latest release of 3.0.9 release of Firefox. Needless to say this is frustrating given that I often download videos on my Ubuntu PC and then play them at school on Windows-based machines. I haven't done any research into the problem but I'll see if it recurs with the new release.

Beginning Again

I've decided to move my technological blog on Edublogs (see addendum at bottom of this post) to Blogger partly for improved centralisation and partly because of the lousy 20Mb of storage space that is allocated (this has now changed, see addendum). For 2009 that is a ridiculously tiny amount of space. I exported the blog as a XML file and tried to import into Blogger but failed. I suspect the problem is at the Edublogs end. For the time being, I've just included a link to my old posts until I can work out a way to move them all across. Goodbye Edublogs. A lot of my activity lately has been with ebooks, ebook formats and ebook readers, of both the software and hardware varieties. 

I'm happy that I've solved a problem that had been bugging me on my Nokia N73. It was difficult to read PDF files using the Adobe Reader program that came with the phone. The text could be viewed but it was awkward to read and in the end I gave up. I had Mobipocket Reader installed on the phone and it possibly might have read the PDF files if it had picked them up during its scan of the memory card but it didn't. Any time I clicked on the PDF file, the dreaded Adobe Reader would open. In the Symbian OS, I wasn't able to disassociate the file from the program. Just another reason to dislike Adobe and the Symbian OS. 

With Mobipocket's Creator, only available for Windows not Linux, I was able to convert my PDF version of Osho's "Book of Wisdom" to PRC format which is now eminently readable using my Mobipocket Reader. There is also a program called "calibre" which works on Windows and Linux that will do the same job. It converts the PDF into a MOBI file which is readable as well but there are glitches in the spacing between words and there are odd hyphenations. I've only tested this on one file so I need to experiment further. However, I'm making use of my mobile phone once again for reading ebooks and getting through them far quicker than when I could only view them on the computer.

ADDENDUM: October 8th 2020

The blog posts on Edublogs are still there and date back to September 30th 2007 when made my first post about Animoto and FileFlash.

As for the meagre 20MB of storage, this was increased to 1GB per blog in 2017. See this Edublog post about the increased storage and other features.