Watching (copy-right protected) DVD’s on Ubuntu Gutsy…

Were you shocked as well when you found out that your Ubuntu (in my case Kubuntu Gutsy 7.10) wouldn’t playback DVD’s that you’ve LEGALLY purchased in shops or through Amazon? That ain’t fair, I’ve paid a good amount of money for my DVD collection and I should not be able to play them on my computer? The reason Ubuntu or probably any other Linux distribution doesn’t ship with an out-of-the-box dvd playback feature is that manufacturers of proprietary Software (e.g WinDVD, PowerDVD, etc..) pay money to ship these CSS (Content Scrambling System codecs which is a Digital Rights Management scheme which is used on almost all commercially produced DVD-Video discs. However at the end of the day, the costumer (we) pay for these DVD-player software, when we buy a DVD/CD Burner or a new graphics card.

This doesn’t apply for Linux or Open Source User – OpenSource Tools as the VLC Player or Kaffeine doesn’t pay these fees to support CSS, because VLC and Kaffeine are non-profit open source programs. There’s no money to gain by „selling“ VLC or Kaffeine, therefore its users (we) don’t pay any money to be legally allowed to view our legally purchased DVD’s.

Dolphin permission problems….

Dolphin, the new KDE file manager (entirely replaced Konqueror, which now serves as a web browser only) still has some teething problems. The main problem I was facing was, whenever I closed Dolphin I got this annoying error message:

After some googleing, I’ve eventually found the solution to my Dolphin problem

sudo chown -R theresa:theresa /home/theresa/.kde (replace theresa with your username)

That did it for me, next time I opened Dolphin, I had no such error message again. God Bless! 😉

the pivot effect with tft screens using ubuntu

Ever wanted to rotate your computer screen because a word document didn’t fit on a page? That’s now possible, if you’re the owner of a TFT screen with pivot function. It comes in quite handy if you’re reading an E-Book with a rather high resolution (e.g 120%). You won’t have to scroll to the end of the page, until the next page starts.

The best way to use the pivot function, provided that you have a Nvidia graphic card, is to install the restricted nvidia driver on ubuntu (this works smoothly on Ubuntu Feisty (6.04) and Ubuntu Gutsy (6.10)) – if you’re still using edgy you have to find the right driver for your kernel version.

After installing the restricted driver you have to open the xorg.conf file (located in /etc/X11/) – but heads up, ALWAYS backup your xorg.conf before you start editing….if you’re using an editor like Kate, then you’re on the safe side, because Kate automatically generates a backup file.

Importing emails in KMail.

Importing emails with KMail is easy – there are several ways to import email from different mail clients (e.g Thunderbird, Evolution, Microsoft Outlook Express, etc…)

Recently I tried importing my old (kmail) emails from my old Kubuntu OS. I made sure to back up the entire /.kde/ folder, but all you really need is this folder

~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/ … this is where all your emails are stored