Sean’s Blog

This week I went ahead and installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop and am generally pretty happy with it. As usual the install was painless quick from the upgrade button on the Update manager. I have been holding off on installing on my desktop because I want to make sure everything is running smoothly before I do a full switch.

One of my grips though is why Firefox 3 beta 5 was included. I like it and it seems to be pretty stable, but several of my plugins don’t work. Google notebook appears to work, but when you try to open it, it just pops open a new blank window. Google Gears is not yet supported in FF3. Several days ago the del.icio.us plugin was upgraded to work at least.

Here are a couple tips that I found useful doing this install:

• If you get a message when you try to run something through wine that says “failed to reserve range: xxx-xxx” try following the instructions here. Fixed it for me.
• Since I use Wine a lot, and by default wine is in a hidden folder (.wine) you can create a link for easier access. At the terminal in your home directory simply type “ln -s .wine wine” (without the quotes) and the will create a link to the folder that you can access without unhiding all directories.

One of the few windows programs that I really miss since I switched over to Ubuntu is IrfanView. I’ve yet to find anything that works as well as a general purpose image viewer and lightweight editor. Usually wine would take care of that, but it didn’t seem to install.

Once I sat down and looked at the output of the errors though, it was pretty apparent that it was just missing a library called mfc42.dll. A quick google search for the missing library and then dropping it into ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/ and the program installed and ran without a hitch.