NBC wasn’t working with Ubuntu
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008Well I’ve just had an interesting 30 minutes – amazingly enough those 30 minutes were spent so my second “BOX” would still be available for me to goof off with.
You see – I use Vista as my main PC. I have a second pc/monitor/keyboard set up to use. To switch between the two I just slide out the keyboard tray.
I like to have some music or something playing while I work, or lately I tend to go to one of the tv stations websites and just set it up to watch the shows. I’m catching up with lost and heroes right now for example.
Well NBC (and some of the others) won’t work on my ubuntu set up and I KNEW there was a way to make it work. So I started digging and found this on one of the forums:
I can never watch NBC.com video using the native Linux Firefox browser–things look like they’re working correctly, but nothing loads. But if I run the Windows version of Firefox in wine, it works fine. So try installing wine with:
sudo apt-get install wine
then download the Windows installer for Firefox from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html . Run the installer just as you would in Windows; after it’s done, you can launch Firefox from the Applications>Wine>Programs menu.
Worked like a charm and I’ve got the first episode of heroes playing in the background now.
If you’ve got an older box lying around and want to improve your functionality, play time, whatever, Ubuntu works great (and about 5 times faster than xp on my older box). I’ve got all the functionality I need to browse, email, watch movies, etc..
I tend to program on my vista box – but I might be switching. I’ll probably also be getting the kids laptops with ubuntu on them for xmas – tired of cleaning up viruses on the “family” laptop and don’t really want to buy 11 year olds a MAC.
Popularity: 17% [?]
Cigar Rollers Los Angeles says:
November 2nd, 2008
2:49 am
Hey, instead of switching keyboards you should check out Synergy.
It’s an open source cross platform app that lets you mouse off the edge of one screen and on to the other, at which point your keyboard will switch over too. It also lets you copy and paste between separate boxes and OSes.
admin says:
November 2nd, 2008
3:37 pm
Thanks for the tip – I’m aware of synergy but my kids tend to crowd my office and I like having the ability to not have them affect my computer
I’ll probably be hooking up another box shortly so I can do that though.