VLC media player supports network streaming from a YouTube. Select Media->Open Network Stream, paste a YouTube URL, and click Play. This seems to work for any YouTube video, and plays back noticeably smoother than Flash on my netbook.

VLC isn’t a perfect solution. First, there’s the inconvenience of copying and pasting a URL for each video. Second, there doesn’t seem to be a way to change the resolution (but it defaults to 480p, which happens to be what I want). Third, VLC doesn’t seem to handle buffering as well as Flash does. While YouTube can play continuously, VLC sometimes has to stop and buffer more video. Selecting Show more options and increasing the cache size to something like 20000 ms seems to help a bit.

I’ve been using Ubuntu 11.10′s VLC for this. While Ubuntu 11.04′s VLC seems to support YouTube, I’ve only been getting VLC can’t recognize the input’s format errors with this version.

It turns out that GNOME 3 will overwrite some touchpad options with it’s own hardcoded defaults. Whenever GNOME re-detects your touchpad, even after a suspend, it will wipe out your options with its own that cannot be changed.

Fortunately GNOME provides a hook so that after your changes are erased, you can set them again. Using a dconf value, you choose to run your own script.

Here’s how to make your custom touchpad configuration persistent through reboots and even suspends. Start by creating a file to hold your script. Run this command to create a touchpad_settings.sh file in your home directory and open it:
gedit ~/touchpad_settings.sh

Add your synclient commands to this file and save it. Mine looks like this:
synclient SingleTapTimeout=360 FastTaps=1
synclient TapButton2=2 TapButton3=3

Make the file executable:
chmod +x ~/touchpad_settings.sh

Finally, set the dconf setting so GNOME knows where to find your script. Run the following command, but replace tom with your own username:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.input-devices hotplug-command "/home/tom/touchpad_settings.sh"

You don’t need to set your touchpad options any other way now. GNOME should run your script whenever you log in or wake the system from suspend.

Run this command to make two-finger tap the middle click, and three-finger tap the right click:
synclient TapButton2=2 && synclient TapButton3=3

Changes made by synclient are not persistent across reboots. You can add the command to Startup Applications to run it automatically when you log in.

[Update: Waking the system from suspend overwrites these options. See my post on how to make touchpad configuration persistent for a fix. ]

Before trying to fix this, I wasn’t even aware of the three-finger tap gesture. It turns out that on my Eee PC 901 this gesture is broken in Ubuntu. Fortunately there are physical right/left mouse buttons, so I can still swap the two and three finger touchpad gestures without losing right click entirely.

Today I pursued the bug report for this issue to find a fix. It didn’t take long to find a workaround using synclient, which is a utility for manipulating options for Synaptics touchpads. Run this command to get the timeout before a tap is interpreted as a single tap:
synclient | grep "SingleTapTimeout"

On my system this option was set to 180, which is too fast. Run this command to double the timeout to 360:
synclient SingleTapTimeout=360

At this point, tap-and-drag should be much easier like in Ubuntu 11.04. But for me, it highlighted a second problem: there was a slight delay before any regular tap would register on the screen. This was very visible in the file browser, where there was a visible delay between tapping a file and that file becoming selected.

Enabling the “FastTaps” option fixes the delay issue:
synclient FastTaps=1

Now on top of touchpad dragging being fixed, the whole system feels more responsive! I hope that I haven’t been using Ubuntu on this netbook with FastTaps disabled all these years. All of the synclient options are documented in the synaptics manpage.

Changes made by synclient are not persistent across reboots. The proper way to set these options would be using Xorg configuration files. For now, I’ve just added the two synclient commands to Startup Applications to run automatically when I log in.

In previous versions of Ubuntu, the lock screen after waking could be disabled in the screen saver settings. In Ubuntu 11.10, the new version of GNOME has changed how this works. GNOME no longer provides any configuration option for this behavior [bug report]. The best workaround seems to be to disable the lock screen entirely, which will not only disable the lock screen after suspend, but also disable the lock screen entirely.

Open a terminal and run this command to disable the lock screen:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.lockdown disable-lock-screen 'true'

Running the command again with true changed to false will reverse the change:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.lockdown disable-lock-screen 'false'

Hopefully either Ubuntu or GNOME will bring back an option for this in a future version.

Any application can be started without overlay scrollbars by changing the LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR environment variable to 0. When starting an application from the terminal, prepend the command with LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0. This example will start gedit with classic scrollbars:
LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0 gedit

I haven’t had any problems with the global menu bar in Unity, but you can disable that for an application in a similar fashion using UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0.

There doesn’t seem to be any sort of global application blacklist available, but if you want to always start a problematic application this way there are a few options. You can modify the application’s menu entry, add a alias for the application’s name, or just launch the application using a script.

Alternatively, overlay scrollbars can be disabled entirely for your user.

This guide is intended for Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10, which both use GRUB version 1.99. If you’ve upgraded from an older Ubuntu installation, you may still have an older version of GRUB. Search in Ubuntu Software Center for grub-pc and check the version if you’re not sure.

There’s a graphical configuration tool for GRUB called StartUp-Manager. Unfortunately, judging by its reviews in Ubuntu Software Center the application has not been updated for the latest version of GRUB and has some problems. But if you’re comfortable with editing a configuration file and running some terminal commands it’s not difficult to change the default operating system manually.

GRUB can be configured using the /etc/default/grub file. Before you make any changes to it, it may be a good idea to back it up by creating a copy:
sudo cp /etc/default/grub /etc/default/grub.bak

You can restore the copying the backup over the original:
sudo cp /etc/default/grub.bak /etc/default/grub

Open the file using the text editor with root privileges:
gksu gedit /etc/default/grub

The line GRUB_DEFAULT=0 means that GRUB will select the first menu item to boot. Change this to GRUB_DEFAULT=saved . This change will make it easier to change the default item later.

Save and close the file. Run this command to apply your changes to GRUB’s configuration:
sudo update-grub

The configuration change we made allows the grub-set-default and grub-reboot commands to be used at any time. These allow you to change the default boot item permanently or only for the next boot, respectively.

Run grub-set-default or grub-reboot (with sudo) with the number of the menu item to boot (the first item is 0). This command will change the default to the second item:
sudo grub-set-default 1

In the screenshot above, Windows Vista is menu item 5. If you want to select an item from a submenu like Previous Linux Versions, you can specify the position in the main menu, followed by a greater-than sign (>), followed by the position in the submenu. You can also name an entry instead of giving its position. There’s a great Ubuntu Forums post about how this works. The Ubuntu Wiki also has more details on configuring GRUB.

1. Make sure the package libdvdread4 is installed. If you’ve installed the very useful Ubuntu Restricted Extras, you will already have it. Otherwise, install it using the Ubuntu Software Center or using the command below:
   sudo apt-get install libdvdread4
2. Next you need to install the software for decryption of DVDs. Make sure you’ve closed any package management software like the Software Center. Open a terminal and run the command below (you will be prompted for your password):
   gksu /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

After completing the process you may have to eject the disk and re-insert it. Ubuntu’s movie player application should now be able to play DVDs, including DVD menus. If you have any trouble, VLC media player is another good player and is available in the Software Center.

See the Ubuntu documentation for more on DVD playback.

Install the classic GNOME desktop by installing the gnome-panel package.
sudo apt-get install gnome-panel

Before you log in, click the gear icon and select GNOME Classic. This will give you a traditional GNOME desktop with top and bottom panels and the Compiz window manager. If you don’t want Compiz’s desktop effects, select the GNOME Classic (No effects) option for the Metacity window manager instead.

If you have problems with the theme being messed up and gnome-settings-daemon crashing, make sure you have installed any available updates. I had this problem before upgrading my Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 1 installation.

There are a few differences between this desktop and the one in previous versions of Ubuntu. It’s now based on GNOME 3, so some applications like the file browser have changed a bit. Ubuntu’s indicators have not been ported to the new GNOME 3 panels, so panel items like the volume meter are GNOME applets. This is the interface which GNOME 3 uses as a fallback from GNOME Shell.

Thanks to Jeremy Bicha for posting about this on Planet Ubuntu and bringing it to my attention.

1. You’ll need the latest version of VirtualBox. Unless you’re already using Ubuntu 11.04, the version in the repositories is too old. You can download the latest version for a variety of platforms from the VirtualBox website.
2. Install Ubuntu in VirtualBox normally. Unity will fall back to the classic desktop.
3. In the settings for your virtual machine, under Display->Video select Enable 3D Acceleration and bump the video memory up to 32 MB.
4. Inside the virtual machine, install the package virtualbox-ose-guest-x11 using Synaptic or the terminal:
   sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-guest-x11
5. Reboot the virtual machine and you should be able to log into Unity.

Unity runs completely smooth in my virtual machine and I haven’t noticed any graphical glitches.

If the panel and applications appear gray and unthemed, gnome-settings-daemon is crashing. You can work around this bug by restarting it:
killall gnome-settings-daemon
gnome-settings-daemon &

Update: Ubuntu 11.10 will detect that it’s running in VirtualBox and offer to install the guest additions driver automatically. You don’t even need to reboot the virtual machine after installing it; just return to the login screen and make sure the Unity environment is selected before you log in again. Impressive!