I just wanted to share about our experience last night with trying to log into our Bank of America account. Ever since we moved (about a month ago) my wife had a 70/30 chance of successfully logging into our online banking. After you put in your credentials you’d get a “address could not be found” error. She contacted their folks and, of course, nothing is wrong on their end.  So she did some research and other people have experienced the same thing.  From her research she’s seen that the common denominator is… you guessed it… Windows Vista!

So; knowing that, we tried it on my installation of Fedora and I tried it with Epiphany and Firefox and BoYAH! We’re in! Just one more reason to switch from Windows to Linux. Linux can get you into online banking.

There are a lot of things happening in my life, but it’s not time to broadcast them yet. The kids are fine (all 3 of them) and me and the wife are happy. My full-time job at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is becoming more stable since I made a very hard decision about my freelance work with Digital · Alias. One can surely guess what I mean based on that sentence, but since everything isn’t final – I’ll keep it vague.

In the world of Linux, I’m getting very tired of Firefox not working out the way I’d like it to. It’s always ran very slow on my desktop (Fedora x86_64). I’ve switched to Epiphany (a GNOME project) and boy does that web browser need some work. Good thing is, it’s fast, bad thing is it’s very immature and I miss ALL the convenient features Firefox has. I’ll stick with it because I need speed more than convenience.

Social Life

I’m on Facebook a lot more now-a-days, but playing their casual games, such as: Mafia Wars, YoVille, and Metropolis. Funny; I realize that these games are a complete waste of time and they are ONLY fun in the beginning when you are trying to balance out everything.  I also see that everyone needs something to fun to do, even if it doesn’t progress your life in any manner.  When you play Xbox or PS3 – those games really don’t add to your life.  The same can be said about these casual online games.

Google Calendar

I’m using Google Calendar a lot more these days.  I’ve got everything from birthdays, tv shows, podcasts and FLOSS events.  Web 2.0 Expo is taking place.  I can see that it’s in San Francisco, but I surely can’t go.  I have a Weekly Joomla conference call with a local group titled, The Atlanta Joomla Open Source Meetup.  And so much more…

Micro-blogging

I have been micro-blogging like mad lately.  Unfortunately; I’ve been interacting on Twitter more than the Laconica instances.  I’ve noticed that there are a lot more mobile and desktop apps for Twitter.  As soon as I pickup on Python, I’m going to make more apps for Laconica.  That’s the social media I’d like to use the most, it’s FLOSS at its best – it’s just under marketed.

Pet Projects

As soon as I can free up so time, I plan on finally taking up some opensource projects.  I am going to start out by learning Python and doing some offline applications.  When I’m comfortable enough, I might then join a GNOME project or be more active with the Fedora Websites group.

I am really surprised at the amount of postings that show you where to get the new Flash Player 10 (x86_64), but not really how to install it if all goes wrong. Yah, they’ll always have, “simply click double click on the RPM file and all will be well in the world.” kind of talk, but what happens if all is NOT well in the world!?  Luckily for me (and you), it always goes wrong – so I end up having to do a manual install every time.  Hopefully this post will help you figure all that out.

Where to Get It

Of course, you’ll need to know where to get this most fantastic program, debuting in Linux.  You think Adobe would make it a bit easier to find.  I had to do a Google search, but I guess since it is an alpha – only the truly persistent will find it.

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

What to Do With It

Once you’ve uncompressed the tarball you will have a simple “libflashplayer.so” file to work with.  What do you do with this .so file you ask?  You can copy or move it to your system’s shared flash player folder.  I’m using Fedora 10 and Firefox (both x86_64) so mine is located in “/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins“.  That’s just a nice place to put it.

I know for the 32-bit versions, if you install it using an RPM or the Package Manger, it’ll put it in “/usr/lib/flash-plugin“.  It can be a combination of  places, but grab the overall concept first. Make the .so file available to multiple browsers on your machine, then refer to it.

Once you have it in a nice, safe place… create a symbolic link from your brower’s plugin directory.  Most of us are using Firfox so run the command:

$ ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
/usr/lib64/firefox-3.0.5/plugins

Of course I’m running Firefox 64-bit.  If you’re not then change the “lib64″ directory to “lib” and if you’re running a different version of Firefox, change that too.

Verify That it Works

If you have Firefox open, simply close it and start it up again.  Check your installed plugins by typing in “about:plugins” in the address bar.  You should see “Shockwave Flash” in there some where.  If you don’t post a comment and I’ll try and help you.

If it’s there… and it should.  Visit any web site that has Flash and you’re good to go. I usually like to try multiple sites at a time just to make sure it doesn’t freeze up on me.  So; I’ll visit YouTube,  MSN and my web site (FergyTech), etc.

Now Give Me Praise for Helping You

Ha-ha, just joking.  I seriously hope this post helped.  Happy surfing you bleeding edge/early adopters you!

What does my blog title mean!?  How can the awesome GNU/LINUX be associated with that dirty dirty word, “proprietary”!?  Well you’ve heard the terms “cutting edge” and “early adopters” before – it usually means having the latest and greatest, but knowing that it’s not perfect.  I experienced that recently and the experience was a bit sobering.  My adventure involves two of the most major components of the Internet!  Well the two most important components for viewing the Internet – Firefox and Flash Player.

I’m running Fedora 9.  This RPM-based linux distribution is known as the “personal” version of Red Hat, nothing corporate about this distro.  So; on  one end it’s a great distro because it has developers that work on Red Hat feeding it patches of code.  For those that may not know, Red Hat is really popular in the business realm.  You’ll see a lot of enterprises running Red Hat.  Ubuntu recently came out their server version, but overall Red Hat has the complete package.

So; Fedora is bleeding edge when it comes to packages – F9 shipped with Firefox 3 beta (or was it release candidate 1) and Flash 9.  Since then Firefox 3.0.2 has been available in their repositories.  It took me a while to figure out this repo thing.  Why did it take so long before the latest version of a package, such as OpenOffice 3.0, would show up in the repo.  Well it’s because once it’s in the repository – you know you have a stable version that works well and good with the distro.

No Cake for Single-thread Sound Processes

I believe the audio package that’s most promising for linux is PulseAudio.  I noticed that whenever I had my music player open (Banshee), I was unable to hear audio on a web site using Flash (ex: YouTube).  It was the same case when I played World of Warcraft (thru Wine).  I came to the conclusion that my audio package is single threaded!  Single threaded!?  That is so Windows 95!  So; I began to make some inquiries on the #fedora chat room on FreeNode.  Someone suggested that I install “libflashsupport.i386″.  Well; I don’t know what it is, but guessing on the file name it looks like a library that helps other packages support Flash.  I installed it and it was gold!  I had my Banshee going and I had YouTube at the same time, I thought all my problems where gone.

After playing some YouTube files I then went to another web site and surprisingly my browser froze!  I thought to myself, “OK; this isn’t a big deal, it’s probably the first time libflashsupport is running so it probably needs to write a preference file somewhere and it’ll all be good the next go around.”  Yah!  At that point every time I went to a site that had Flash on it, no matter how complex or insignificant it was, my browser would freeze.  I have Firefox, Swiftfox, and Flock web browsers.  I tried each browser and at some point they would all crash.

So; the logical thing to do would be to remove the last component I installed – I removed “libflashsupport.i386″, but the problem still happened.  That library seemed to have fudge things up for me.  I ended up manually installing Flash 10, poking around in my package manager for anything that had the word “flash” in it.  Nothing worked.  For about two weeks or so I had so surf the web without Flash support.  At one point I realized that I can’t enjoy the web or some web sites because they use Flash in some kind of way.  We’ve become very dependent on Flash for presentation.

Factory Defaults

My last option was to revert the “factory settings” and see if that does anything.  I removed “firefox” and “flash” using my package manager and then installed them again.  That action put me back at status quo.  I’m running Flash 10 (at some point it made it into the repo) and Firefox 3.0.4.  I learned that I don’t have to have the latest and greatest.  There’s  a reason why I should wait until it’s released in the repo.  All-in-all, the repo is the “proprietary” component to a linux distribution… and I guess I can live with that.

I am experiencing a deafening silience when it comes to the audio on my Fedora box.  As of this article being published I can not hear audio playing on my computer.  Such as:

• MP3s, Oggs
• YouTube, Hulu, and Flash-based player

Ironically when I do a “Soundcard Detection” it does find it, I hear the test audio.  I can even hear my recording that I just created in Audacity.  I am at a lotal lost.

Banshee 1.0

I think it started when I tried to install the lastest rave of audio players, Banshee 1.0.  I’m running Fedora 8, I’m a linux noob, so I checked my respositories and it had a version 0.13.  YUM search, YUM install all produced a non-1.0 version.  So; I downloaded the source file and tried to ./configure, make, make install.  Not to my surprise I had a dependency issue.  I did a search in my program manager and then google.com for any direction.  I’d find the library file and install THAT from source.  For the next hour or so it was rince and repeat.  Evey time I executed ./configure, I kept falling into a depenency issue.

For some of them I installed by source, but Fedora still didn’t recognize that it was installed.

Over the past couple of months – I’ve picked up that any library or program that comes stock with the distro you will find in /usr folder.  Anything you install afterwards should go into the /usr/local folder.  In there it has a “src”, “share”, and a “lib” folder.  So I could move my source files to /usr/local/src and compile them from there.  I would also install precomipled programs, such as Fire fox into the /usr/local/share/applications folder.

Well basically the system wouldn’t look into the /usr/local/lib folder to see that library I just install resides there.  I ended up on my LUG’s mailing list for some answers.  They pointed me into the right direction, but I STILL had other dependency issues.  It was not a pretty site.  Ironically; my older IBM Thinkpad R40 laptop is running Fedora 9 and I did “YUM install banshee” and it installed version 1.0 without any issues.  Hmmm, I might need to upgrade my desktop.

Overall; YUM seems to be a better route of installing programs, I just need to understand how to work it.  I still haven’t figured out the problem – I don’t know where to start.  This sucks!