Flashplayer 10.1 and Google Chrome works better in Fedora 13 than Ubuntu Lucid 10.04

After using Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit for long, I faced two weird problems

1. When network is down while opening Google Chromium or Google Chrome in Ubuntu, it is taking lots of time to open and forgets all the saved passwords and settings. Though the restore button is present, it seldom works (see the link some one has similar problem http://millionchimpanzees.blogspot.com/2010/05/chromium-on-ubuntu-1004-slower-than.html)
Also http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=11380

2. 32 bit Flashplayer 10.1 in 64 bit ubuntu through nspluginwrapper works fine in Chrome/Chromium when it works (and often crashes) and the controls in flashplayer never works inside firefox 64 bit

As usual, I wanted to see how it works in Fedora 13 as in the following link chromium developers mention they don't face network problem in Fedora  http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=11380 .

So I resolved to install Fedora 13 to see if it worked without network issues in google chrome

Though I struggled installing Fedora 13 earlier (2 to 3 weeks back) due to nvidia card problems, this time I dared to install Fedora 13 as it was a Sunday (27/June/2010)

It was simple than I thought before to install Fedora 13, boot with nomodeset and ta da, no nouveau, excellent

Installed Fedora 13 and installed akmod-nvidia from rpmfusion (last time, Fedora 13 installation failed in my system due to kmod-nvidia, which is not intelligent to rebuild after kernel update, whereas akmod-nvidia takes care of rebuilding nvidia kernel for newer kernels automatically like dkms of ubuntu)

I installed google chrome from google website http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?platform=linux_fedora_x86_64

Fedora 13 google-chrome , does not have any network problems and it worked very well, to tell extremely well unlike ubuntu version did

Now came the real challenge, I wanted to install flashplayer 32 bit inside fedora 64 bit. Tried whole sunday and did not get sound. Thought of going back to Ubuntu, but I did not give up easily. I googled again today and encountered following site

http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/install-adobe-flash-player-10-on-fedora-centos-red-hat-rhel/

Following the above link fixed flash plugin in Fedora x64

Flash 10.1 started working and works extremely well. It does not use processor heavily like flashplayer 10.1 in ubuntu did


And now pino twitter client works extremely well unlike gwibber in 64 bit

Just thought I will post about this

Fedora rocks as always

But do I miss my ubuntu ? No, I have the 32 bit Ubuntu Lucid running in VirtualBox OSE since Ubuntu 10.04 came

So it was simple, I installed VirtualBox inside Fedora (as root, yum install VirtualBox-OSE), pointed to my ubuntu virtual harddisk image (yeah I have a home partition, which I never format, unlike the root partition, this helps me switching distros easy)

see below

Ubuntu Linux 10.04 - How to put unused harddisk into standby mode

This article explains how to make your unused harddisk into idle mode to save power and increase lifetime of that harddisk

I have two harddisks, one for windows and one for linux. Though windows harddisk is hardly used when I am in Ubuntu linux, it is still in active mode. What it means is harddisk is spinning always though it is not being accessed by me or by the operating system. In case of windows harddisk, it is not even mounted but still spinning always.


Setting harddisk to standby mode will increase the lifetime of unused harddisk and also consumes less power. This will also decrease the amount of heat generated by the spinning harddisk. As a side effect your acoustics will be improved. Though the harddisk is in standby mode, it will wake up when you mount it or when you try accessing files.

I did the following to bring the unused harddisk to standby or idle mode.



sudo hdparm -S 12 /dev/sdb

S accepts a time unit which tells the harddisk to be brought down to standby mode, if the harddisk is not accessed by any program within the unit of time. The value of S here is 12 which means, the harddisk is brought down to standby if not accessed within 1 minute. The following info (goto bottom of this page to see the values possible and more about -S if you dont want to give man hdparm) from the hdparm manual tells more about -S than my words







/dev/sdb tells the harddisk to be brought down to standby. Change sdb to sda or sdc or whichever harddidsk you want to bring to standby.

To verify if the harddisk state, you can use hdparm -C


sudo hdparm -C /dev/sdb


will print the current state of harddisk sdb (see screenshot below)

To do this automatically everytime Ubuntu boots, I added this line inside my /etc/rc.local file

sudo vi /etc/rc.local


and add the following line before last line

hdparm -S 12 /dev/sd<N>


where <N> should be replaced with a or b or c or d or .. based on your harddisk

See the following screenshot of my /etc/rc.local file to know how it should look (it should look similar, dont blindly copy the harddisk names, your harddisks may be different like sdb may be linux and sda may be windows or .... any permutations and combinations)

---

-S option description below taken from man hdparm


Put the drive into idle (low-power) mode, and also set the standby (spindown) timeout for the drive.  This timeout value is used by the drive to determine how long to wait (with no disk activity)  before  turning  off
the  spindle  motor to save power.  Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long as 30 seconds to respond to a subsequent disk access, though most drives are much quicker.  The encoding of the timeout value is
somewhat peculiar.  A value of zero means "timeouts are disabled": the device will not automatically enter standby mode.  Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from  5  seconds  to  20
minutes.   Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours.  A value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-defined time‐
out period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved.  255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds.  Note that some older drives may have very different interpretations of these values.


Ubuntu Linux 10.04 -- it is boring

For 4 years I have been distro hopping and it was full of fun. This Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 is boring stuff, no challenge, everything works, works extremely well.

Makes me lazy and really boring. Time for Fedora 13 ...

Running 32 bit Adobe Flash Player 10.1 on Ubuntu Lucid 64 bit

Update: Ubuntu repository has updated flashplugin-installer in a flash (pun intended), just update it and you are set to run 10.1 flash player even in 64 bit linux!! see the below screenshot

Just update and run the latest flashplayer 10.1 in 64 bit ubuntu. If you still want to read the boring stuff below, go ahead, I won't stop you





Today my experiment was running 10.1 adobe flash player on 64 bit ubuntu. I downloaded the deb from adobe site and tried installing it and I got an error saying about architecture mismatch. I blindly copied the 32 bit flashplayer shared object into /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ but it refused to play

Then I started to search and ended up in the following rare info on how to install 32 bit 10.1 flash player beta in 64 bit ubuntu. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1329337

I tried as mentioned in the above post #1 for 10.1 flash player final and wow it worked in 64 bit lucid lynx!! Thank you very much to the post, I tried to post in that forum to thank, but the thread is karmic thread and closed, anyhow, thanks a lot for such a post.

I share my experiment with you for your  reading pleasure and probable fun (hopefully)

Here is how I did it step by step as mentioned in the ubuntuforum #1 with screenshots

Step 1

Install flashplugin-installer from synaptic or through apt from command line

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer     

Step 2

Remove old 10.x flash player

sudo rm /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so

Step 3

Get adobe flashplayer 10.1 from adobe site and extract it

http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz

After extracting it you will be getting libflashplayer.so which is version 10.1

Step 4


Copy the extracted libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/ folder

sudo cp ~/Downloads/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/

Step 5


Restart your browsers and verify flashplugin installed using about:plugins

Flashplayer 10.1 in action in firefox (64 bit firefox)

Flashplayer 10.1 in action in chromium (64 bit chromium from synaptic repositories)

Enjoy

Google Chromium is super in Ubuntu Lucid

Ubuntu Lucid repositories have updated the open source build of google chromium to 5.0.375.38

It is faster than the previous build, opens web pages in a jiffy.

Love Google and it's chrome/chromium browsers, for Firefox never cared it's 64 bit users, whereas chrome/chromium cares

If you are a 64 bit linux user, then you won't miss firefox after using Google Chrome/Chromium

Hope next version of Firefox will support 64 bit linux users