Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment requires 3D acceleration to run. If you don’t have a compatible graphics card or don’t have the drivers installed, Unity will fall back to the classic interface. Fortunately the free VirtualBox virtual machine software is capable of providing the necessary 3D acceleration to a virtual Ubuntu desktop, provided of course that [...]

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One audio bug I had in Ubuntu 9.10 and now 10.04 is that below a certain volume level, I get no sound at all. Once I raise the volume past that level sound works but the lowest volume is louder than I sometimes want. Fortunately there’s a workaround available in PulseAudio: You’ll need to edit [...]

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I couldn’t find much information about keyboard shortcuts for Compiz effects in Ubuntu 10.04. I poked through the default Compiz configuration and found some I didn’t know about, and some that have changed from previous versions of Ubuntu. Some of the following keyboard shortcuts will not work at all if Compiz (visual effects) if turned [...]

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So far the only issue I’ve had switching to 64-bit from 32-bit Ubuntu has been Flash. In some Flash content, mouse clicks are not recognized. Everything looks correct, but any left clicks are ignored. Most notably, the problem affects YouTube videos. Here’s the Ubuntu bug report. A 64-bit browser can not load 32-bit plugins. On [...]

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Ubuntu makes it easy to enable automatic login if you’re using a login manager such as GDM. I was recently setting up a minimal Ubuntu 9.10 system with an LXDE desktop and no GDM. Here’s how I enabled automatic login. Note: This was tested on Ubuntu 9.10. Previous versions of Ubuntu require different procedures because [...]

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