Amazon Prime is one of the best options for legally watching movies on Linux.
After upgrading to Kubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail), Amazon Prime video would no longer play back in Chrome or Firefox.
I tried all the usual fixes: Install hal, libhal, make sure I had the latest flash player, etc. but nothing seemed to work.
As it turns out hal was not working out of the box.

I recently purchased a Lite-On IHBS112-04 12X Internal Blu-ray Writer from Amazon. After installing the dive I booted into Linux (Kubuntu 12.04 LTS) and tried to burn a blue ray disc using K3b. K3B recognized the drive and the blue ray media no problem so I proceeded to burn some system backups to a new data project as a test. Everything went fine until the very end. After reaching 99% I would get the following error: KD3 Fatal error during recording:input/output So I tried to burn the same project again at a lower speed. Same thing.

Please watch the video for the full tutorial. Basically all you have to do is this.

The ati fglrx driver is still not working for my Radeon HD 4200.
I am sure I can get it working as I did before using alternative drivers, but preffer to test and report bugs to try to help get the official driver working.

Without any driver the card works great in kubuntu 10.04 with the exception of 3d rendering being slow. All of the composite effect work great.
Unfortunately after I install the driver the desktop will not load even after I un-install the driver.

The first beta of the next Kubuntu Long Term service release is out.
I have been running the development release candidates on one of my entertainment computers for a while now and unfortunately for me the upgrade was not so smooth. Ok, it was a disaster, but only because I was running a bunch of backports and had other non-supported ppa repositories for various hardware reasons.

After a backup and full re-install averything went smooth as silk.

Chromium on Linux finally has plugin support!

To enable plugins, just start chromium with --enable-pluggins

chromium-browser --enable-plugins

To get the latest version of Chromium, Debian based builds can simply add the proper repository

See https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa for instructions on how to add chromium to add the repository.

Enjoy

Comcast recently shipped me 3 Digital converter boxes to support the upcoming switch to an all Digital Signal.
Unfortunately the digital signal requires using the new digital converter boxes to change channels. This is a huge inconvenience to anyone using a 3rd party DVR as well as for anyone who recently purchased a new digital TV which features like PIP as these features are likely not to work with the new converter boxes.

Luckily for those of us running MythTV, we just need to make some minor changes to get our Home-Brew DVR work with the new converter Boxes.

Finally, A pay per download service that doesn't require a proprietary player. The new Amazon Unbox service, which is still in beta, allows you to watch pay-per-download movies directly in your browser. The only requirement is Adobe Flash 9 and a fast internet connection. This means that Linux users now have a legal alternative to downloading torrents.