Alexander Yermakov. My life.

So, few days since I installed Ubuntu as a second OS on my laptop and I’m back to Vista. I guess I’m too old to deal with Ubuntu - I am not a young guy anymore who wants to play with his computer and spend time making it work, dealing with lots of issues that people in Windows environment never have to even think about. All I want - a computer that works when I need it and works properly. Linux fanboys may say otherwise, though - Windows is an awful OS and there is nothing better than Linux. Well, I guess they’ve got too much time on their hands or they spend all their time in front of their computers. I prefer to go out and party or go to a beach or play golf or whatever

Last thing that fed me up in Ubuntu is the fact that my built-in microphone, which works just great in Windows, all of a sudden got really quiet in Ubuntu and I had to speak very loud while talking on Skype. Trying to “boost” it via PulseAudio manager and other tools doesn’t really help. It took me about 2-3 hours of research and figuring out, to just realize that there is nothing that works. And this was just one of the problems that simply do not exist in Windows.

As someone said - Linux is free when your time doesn’t cost anything. And my time is quite valuable to me - I will stick with something that just works and get rid of Ubuntu partition.

Another issue - 64 bit Ubuntu 9.04 and Flash support in Firefox. Actually this one seems to be quite easy to deal with.

1. Run the following to remove the default SWF plugin which doesn’t really work:
   sudo apt-get remove swfdec-mozilla libswfdec-0.8-0
2. Then follow this guide from Step 2.

Restart Firefox and make sure that Flash is working properly (you can go to www.youtube.com to check that).

So, recently I got so fed up with Vista that I decided to put Ubuntu 9.04 (the latest release as of now) on my laptop as a second OS with the idea to move to it and abandon Windows altogether.

Installation went great - it took me about 15 minutes to configure and install it. Everything seemed awesome - I installed 64 bit OS version and was ready to use it. Well, it took me a minute to see that there are few pieces of software that don’t come with the OS by default - Skype was one of them. Quick search on the net revealed a link that allowed me to get 64bit version of Skype fo Linux and I managed to install it right away. Then came audio issues. I quickly managed to get Skype working, but then I noticed that if Skype was running then any other software that does audio output wouldn’t produce sound. I tried everything I could have thought of with no luck, but then I run into few posts and forums that helped me out.

1. To set up Skype to work (audio in, out and Skype system sounds):
   

   Skype Sound Settings

   This sets PulseAudio library as the main audio processor here. Once you do this, Skype should work just fine, but you may experience issues with simultanious audio from few pieces of software.

2. If you have issues with audio output from simaltaniously running programs, you may need to do more set ups. In my case, Skype wouldn’t work if I was listening to music or watching videos. So, I found this page, which helped me with refreshing installation of PulseAudio. For Ubuntu 9.04 just follow “Part A” appendix there as suggested by the author. The only thing I had to do diffrently - reboot my computer before step 5 in that appendix.
3. Finally, to make VLC use PulseAudio you need to execute the following command from Terminal:

   sudo apt-get install vlc-plugin-pulse

   This will download and install plugin that enables VLC to use audio library.

Well, this is it. Pretty simple once you know what you’re doing.