Tired of not having support for your MP3s, WMA, WMV, and other media formats? Getting frustrated with Firefox not having audio support for flash? What about not being able to build that software you want from the source code? Well, don’t sweat, I’m going to show you a couple simple things that will help you out in Ubuntu, that should help you fix these problems. Plus, I’ll show you how to get access to a ton of software repositories.

The following fixes should work in Debian as well.

For Flash audio support in Firefox do the following:

In your terminal type:
sudo apt-get install alsa-oss
sudo gedit /etc/firefox/firefoxrc

In the firefoxrc file change
FIREFOX_DSP=”none”
to
FIREFOX_DSP=”aoss”

For MP3, WMA, WMV and a ton of other media support type the following into your terminal:

sudo apt-get install libxine-extracodecs w32codecs gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly

To finally be able to create software from the source code type this into your terminal:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

That should have you sorted out pretty well, but if you decide that Ubuntu’s default repositories just don’t have enough gear for you, I’ve got you covered there too. There’s a website out there that will generate a source.list addition for you just by you picking the options you want. While I’m sure that our Ubuntu veterans know about this site already, some of you who have just made the switch may not have found it yet. It’s called Source-O-Matic sources.list generator and can be found at http://www.ubuntulinux.nl/source-o-matic. It will give you the desired repositories and information on how to access the PGP protected ones. Unlike the commands, however, the sources.list information will not help you in Debian. Still, it’s nice to have.

If you liked that, try...

1. VLC 0.9.2 Released
2. Automatix: Obsolete?
3. Review of Ubuntu 7.10
4. Ubuntu 7.10 Is Here
5. Watsa Matta with Ubuntu?

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