Firefox: Youtube Videos Reconsidered

Before I wrote how to use mplayer to play youtube videos. Which worked great for me for a long time. But for some reason or another it does not play nice with me anymore. Sometimes it breaks on buffering and sometimes it just stops playing midstream.

I decided to uninstall gecko-mediplayer and replace it with totem-plugin. And now everything works great again. The reason I did not use totem-plugin before was because it pulls in a ton of dependencies that I do not use.

Verdict as of now

totem-plugin > gecko-mediaplayer

Firefox: Play Youtube videos with mplayer

I think everybody who has ever suffered through flash on Linux systems, know how horribly awful it truly can be. Fortunately things have gotten better, but not by much. I still see the flash-plugin crash randomly across several different systems that I use. There is always the choice of using html5 to play youtube videos now, but it requires quite some processing power. In my case that means that I can not use html5 to play youtube videos on my Netbooks, because it feels like turning the pages in a newspaper.

This is where mplayer comes in, since it can play pretty much every video format out there (including flash videos) and it does it really well.

Kde4: Autostart

I like having total control over what gets loaded when I log on to my desktop. Thankfully Kde4 gives me very good control over this. Personally I've never been a big fan of using XDG *.desktop files for autostarting applications. I have to say that it is very simple to add autostart programs through Kde4's system settings. But I prefer using basic bash scripts to load what I want, maybe it is because I'm used to doing so with Openbox.

From what I have discovered Kde4 has essentially two user specific Autostart directories, not counting the XDG standard directories. Also it has one shutdown directory which essentially executes whatever you want when you logout. I'll explain later why that could be useful.

Linux: Reinstall Grub2 With A LiveCD/USB

This is how I recover Grub2 after Windows successfully overwrites my mbr. I also use this method to fix my grub config after a failed install. This usually only happens when I use /dev/sdx names over UUID's. On some motherboards simply rearranging your HDD boot order will offset the entire /dev/sdx order as well. Making your Grub entries useless, not really a big issue since you can correct the entries directly from the grub menu. Anyway lets move onwards.

Linux: Razer Diamondback

There are probably not many people that still use the Razer Diamondback optical mouse. And unfortunetaly Razer do not make these models anymore. Which is a damn shame since I have broken all of their other models, but my first original Diamondback is still in one piece which is suprising considering that it has take a lot more abuse than all of the other models I own.

Anyway I've noticed that the back and forward buttons on the mouse is mapped incorrectly. Usually the back and forward functions are mapped to the two buttons on either side of the mouse. Most commonly on the left side. However on my desktop I move backwards with one button the left side of the mouse and forward with one button the right side of the mouse. This needs to be fixed and I'll tell you how to do it here.

Udisks: Mount Devices Without Password Prompt

I like being able to quickly access my plugged in devices through Dolphin by simply clicking on them in the sidebar. However everytime I do this it keeps asking me for my password. Thankfully it is very easy to get rid of this annoyance.

Since I am running pretty much a full Kde4 desktop, I'll just assume that you will have some kind of policykit/polkit agent installed. Almost all distributions have one installed by default, however since I run Arch Linux this might not always be the case.

KDE4: Change Window Manager

There are two ways to change the default Kde4 window manager. One involves creating a script that changes a global variable and the other involves using Kde system settings. While both methods work I always find solutions involving working in a terminal to be simpler and faster. Still I will be detailing both methods to the best of my knowledge.  

Update: Recently it has become quite popular to try out the new opengl es mode of kwin. Which was originally aimed to bring proper compositing to mobile platforms and is paving the way for compositing on wayland. Currently it seems that this new code will eventually replace the old opengl code. The reasons to why this is so interesting is that it supposedly brings a few perfomance improvements. I've yet to confirm this, but it does run fine on my netbook using intel drivers. But on my desktops using Nvidia graphics it fails miserably, this could be beceause of the code or because of the Nvidia drivers, who knows. Anyway it is worth trying out, but keep in mind that your mileage may very greatly depending on what kind of hardware and drivers you are using.

Have a look at Martin Gräßlin's blog for further details.
http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2011/07/running-kwin-with-opengl-es-2-0/