Thursday, December 27, 2012

Kosher Ubuntu 12.10 - Full media support

Ubuntu comes with almost ready-to-go Desktop operating system. Almost, because my favorite Linux distribution separates free and non-free software packages. This is especially visible when comes to the media codecs support, since the latter are often released under restrictive licenses.

In practice, you need to add additional bundles repository and explicitly install some packages from it. Also some of the restricted packages you would like to download are available in the standard repository.

Start with adding Medibuntu repository to your system...
sudo -E wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list
sudo apt-get --quiet update
sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring
sudo apt-get --quiet update
The command below will integrate Medibuntu packages with your Desktop even tighter (by adding Unity lauchers and so forth).
sudo apt-get install app-install-data-medibuntu apport-hooks-medibuntu
Now install codecs with closed licenses...
sudo apt-get install w32codecs win64codecs ubuntu-restricted-extras
If you watch movies from DVDs on your computer, you would like to have installed support for the encrypted ones (i.e. the majority of the positions available on the market).
sudo apt-get install libdvdread4
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh
After applying all the steps above, non-free media and Ubuntu will become friends again.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Kosher Ubuntu 12.10 - Broken wireless network

After you install Ubuntu 12.10 and update the installed packages to the latest version, your machine will stop to find wireless networks. Unfortunately the latest kernel update for Ubuntu doesn't work well with Broadcom (BCM) wireless network chipsets.

What you need to do is connect your computer to the wired network, download kernel headers...
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic

...rebuild and reinstall your wireless network chipset module...
sudo apt-get install --reinstall bcmwl-kernel-source

...and finally reload the mentioned module.
sudo modprobe wl

Now do enjoy your wireless network again.