If the American government invested as many resources rounding up violators of software licenses as it does fighting “terror” (and no, I don’t mean the Jacobin variety), I’d have been put away long ago, because all of my Ubuntu systems use patented multimedia software that I didn’t pay for.  But I’ve recently realized that it doesn’t have to be this way, and that legal codec support is easily available.  Here’s a look at some of those options.

If you’re like me, you don’t put much thought into where your multimedia codecs come from: you run a quick “apt-get install gstreamer-plugins-ugly” on new installs and move on to more important things.  But not everyone’s like me, and as Ubuntu moves increasingly into government and the workplace, patent and licensing issues are becoming more and more important for many Ubuntu users.

Ubuntu comes with a nice application called “Hardware Drivers” (a.k.a. jockey-gtk) for installing proprietary drivers for wireless cards and other devices that lack open-source support. This is great, except when your only connection to the Internet is wireless and you have no way to download the driver or firmware you need. Here’s why this situation should change.

A build of the nouveau video driver for nVidia cards was included in the Ubuntu repositories beginning with Jaunty.  I’ve been meaning to test it for a while, and finally found some hardware recently to give it a shot.

More than 600 people registered to attend Atlanta Linux Fest, which was held Sept. 19. Many of the standing-room-only sessions focused on Canonical and Ubuntu. Here are nine Ubuntu-oriented highlights from the event.

Wireless on Linux is a perennial embarrassment.  Although the situation has improved immensely since a few years ago, the inability to get wireless cards working acceptably often tops the list of user frustrations. Here’s an outline of what’s wrong with Ubuntu’s approach to wireless drivers, and how to fix it.

Kernel mode setting will be enabled by default for Intel-based video cards on Ubuntu 9.10, set to be released in October.  I recently played around with this new feature on a Karmic Koala live CD, and share my results below.

Because I was traveling, I didn’t get around to upgrading my desktop to Ubuntu 9.04 until yesterday.  After what seemed like the fastest Ubuntu installation and quickest boot ever on my system, I was excited to log into Gnome and see what the stable release of Jaunty has to offer.  Instead, I was met with a lot of frustration and loss of faith in Ubuntu’s commitment to stability, due to egregious regressions in the performance of my Intel video card.

One of the most innovative features to find its way into the Linux kernel recently is support for master mode on several wireless chipsets.  Though there’s been little fanfare surrounding this development, it could soon be giving home users, in particular, another reason to celebrate Ubuntu.

I like to run the latest software, so every 6 months when a new Ubuntu debuts I upgrade my system. To keep everything running smoothly I like to start with a clean install, but I always find myself repeating the same modifications. Some of these modifications are essential to get certain features to work, one of them is something I couldn’t do without. Here are my five essential Ubuntu modifications.