The version of Wine provided by default in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx has a curious issue. No sound output. Now I’m not exactly sure why this is but this is an issue I’ve found before using Karmic. To resolve this issue I simply added the PPA for winepulse (https://launchpad.net/~neil-aldur/+archive/ppa) which has a patched version of Wine that uses Pulseaudio. You may know that a few versions ago Ubuntu switched from ALSA to Pulseaudio so it could be this change that causes the problems. Anyway add the PPA and simply do an upgrade and Wine will be replaced with Winepulse.

Advantage? Sound works and, as it’s using Pulseaudio, audio mixing works.

Lucid Lynx comes with version 10.0.45 which has some problems with compiz. The problems are buttons not working and unable to right-click to enable or disable hardware acceleration. To solve this issue I upgraded flash to 10.1 beta 3

You first need to make sure you’ve installed flash from the Ubuntu repositories as this sets up all the correct symlinks. To do this from command line:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

Now download flash 10.1 beta 3 from Adobe and unpack it:

wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_1_p3_linux_022310.tar.gz
tar -xvf flashplayer10_1_p3_linux_022310.tar.gz

Backup the old libflashplayer.so:

sudo mv /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so.old

Then replace with the newly downloaded one:

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

Now relaunch your browser and do about:plugins. You should see it displayed like this:

Enjoy your new flash plugin!

Spotify doesn’t yet have a native Linux client, but that doesn’t stop us from using this brilliant program. The developers of Spotify have made sure that the application has close to 100% compatibility with Wine so it can be used on Linux. The best guide to getting this installed is to follow the guide at the official Spotify website. One thing to mention is that if you are using the latest Wine with Karmic, then you will want to use Pulseaudio instead of ALSA in winecfg.

One thing you will want to do is add Spotify to the Gnome menu. By going to System > Preferences > Main Menu and selecting New Item you can make the shortcut to load Spotify. I selected Sound & Video from the left and clicked New Item using these settings:

Type: Application
Name: Spotify
Command: wine "C:\Program Files\Spotify\spotify.exe"
Comment: Spotify

You’ll most likely want to have a nice icon for Spotify. You can download this SVG icon http://kallepersson.se/upl/spotify.svg and place it into /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/ (you’ll need to be superuser to do this):

sudo mv /path/to/spotify.svg /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/

changing /path/to to the location of the spotify.svg file you downloaded. ~/Downloads/spotify.svg if you downloaded using Firefox.

Update: Just noticed that these instructions do not work with Lucid Lynx. I’ll be preparing and publishing an updated guide in the next few days.

Today I finally decided to get this remote working in Ubuntu. The remote has the model number of RC118 and works exactly like the standard MCE remote. The difficulty is with the receiver which is a Formosa device which emulates the MCE Home receiver. Lirc now has support for this receiver so I just had to make a small change:

install lirc and replace /etc/lirc/hardware.conf with the following:

# /etc/lirc/hardware.conf
#
#Chosen Remote Control
REMOTE="Windows Media Center Remotes (new version Philips et al.)"
REMOTE_MODULES="lirc_dev lirc_mceusb"
REMOTE_DRIVER=""
REMOTE_DEVICE="/dev/lirc0"
REMOTE_LIRCD_CONF="mceusb/lircd.conf.mceusb"
REMOTE_LIRCD_ARGS=""

#Chosen IR Transmitter
TRANSMITTER="None"
TRANSMITTER_MODULES=""
TRANSMITTER_DRIVER=""
TRANSMITTER_DEVICE=""
TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_CONF=""
TRANSMITTER_LIRCD_ARGS=""

#Enable lircd
START_LIRCD="true"

#Don't start lircmd even if there seems to be a good config file
#START_LIRCMD="false"

#Try to load appropriate kernel modules
LOAD_MODULES="true"

# Default configuration files for your hardware if any
LIRCMD_CONF=""

#Forcing noninteractive reconfiguration
#If lirc is to be reconfigured by an external application
#that doesn't have a debconf frontend available, the noninteractive
#frontend can be invoked and set to parse REMOTE and TRANSMITTER
#It will then populate all other variables without any user input
#If you would like to configure lirc via standard methods, be sure
#to leave this set to "false"
FORCE_NONINTERACTIVE_RECONFIGURATION="false"
START_LIRCMD=""

then remove the current loaded module for lirc_mceusb and load the new one:

$ sudo rmmod lirc_mceusb
$ sudo modprobe lirc_mceusb

and running irw should show the module working and recognising keypresses. Boxee is great when using a remote!

Update:

The remote works in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) without needing to edit any configuration files. Just install lirc and when you are asked to configure, select “Windows Media Centre Remote”