Wayne D's Blog

Sometimes last week when I shut down our Windows XP machine it said it had eleven updates to install. That was it, on the next start the machine blue screened. Trying Safe Mode boot or Safe Mode boot with command prompt resulted in the same BSOD with a Page Fault in Non Paged Memory after the system loaded agp440.sys. I searched high and low for my Windows XP disk without any success. The 50GB hard drive in the machine was full anyway so after a few days I went off to Tigerdirect and bought a 1 TB hard drive and a PCI SATA card because this machine was too old to support SATA drives. I had a Ubuntu 7.10 CD around and installed it on a 500GB partition I created on the new drive. I then immediately upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04LTS. This is an older PC so I didn't want to go to version 9.10 because I've noticed that newer version of Linix don't run so well on older PC's.

What is the experiment? To determine if my wife and kids will use Linux without complaining to excess. After install I had two complaints to resolve. First, Flash didn't work. There were unmet dependencies. Thanks to a blog post at http://thushw.blogspot.com/2009/05/flash-plugin-for-firfox-on-ubuntu-8041.html that was fairly easy to fix. The required commands are shown below.


sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libnss3.so.1d /usr/lib/libnss3.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libssl3.so.1d /usr/lib/libssl3.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplds4.so.0d /usr/lib/libplds4.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplc4.so.0d /usr/lib/libplc4.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libnspr4.so.0d /usr/lib/libnspr4.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libsmime3.so.1d /usr/lib/libsmime3.so


The second problem was that the free java that came installed didn't have java support in the browser. I installed Sun java 6 and the browser plugin, which had to be installed manually. The commands used are shown below.

cd /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so


Third problem, rstp streams didn't work in the browser, that was resolved by installing mplayer, smplayer and mplayer-plugin. This is only a partial fix because the rtsp streams of interest are contained in a .cgi file which in Windows XP was handled by Realplayer. Realplayer would show the list of rtsp streams in the playlist window, so far I haven't figured out whether mplayer or smplayer can display the multiple links in the file as a playlist to allow a user to navigate through the files.

My intent is to write posts about the bumps along the Linux road as I continue to use my wife and kids as lab rats in the great Linux experiment.