Sound issues

open terminal and type:

alsamixer

look for any muted channels...

Clipboard Selection Behavior

Clipboard/Selection Behavior

General

Klipper can be used to set the behavior of the clipboard and selection in KDE.

Note:
The X Window System® uses two separate clipboard buffers: the “selection” and the “clipboard”. Text is placed in the selection buffer by simply selecting it, and can be pasted with the middle mouse button.


To place text in the clipboard buffer, select it and press Ctrl+X or Ctrl+C. Text from the clipboard buffer is pasted using Ctrl+V or by selecting Edit → Paste.

Changing Clipboard/Selection Behavior
 In order to change clipboard/selection behavior, select Configure Klipper... from the Klipper pop-up menu, and in the dialog box that appears, select the General page.

Unchecking Synchronize contents of the clipboard and the selection makes the clipboard and selection function as completely separate buffers as described above. With this option set, the option Ignore selection will prevent Klipper from including the contents of the selection in its clipboard history and from performing actions on the contents of the selection. Selecting Synchronize contents of the clipboard and the selection causes the clipboard and selection buffers to always be the same, meaning that text in the selection can be pasted with either the middle mouse button or the key combination Ctrl+V, and similarly for text in the clipboard buffer.

Firefox -download managers Flashgot and Aria

This download manager was installed Oct 9, 2012; updated Nov 4 2012



sudo apt-get install aria
[sudo] password for chad:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree    
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package aria
chad@chad-desktop:~$

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after trouble with Firefox Flashgot, it looked like the download manager was not working
(looking at the Flashgot log)

I installed Aria2 tonight Nov 4

Multimedia Player -VLC

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/PlayingDVDs

Ubuntu 10.04 (i386, amd64), 10.10, 11.04, 11.10 and 12.04 (i386, amd64)

Works for old releases that are no longer supported if you have repositories on Cd/Dvd or somewhere. So, anything from 9.04 onwards. The latest LTS, 10.04, and the radically different 11.04 also work this way.

• Install the libdvdread4 package (no need to add third party repositories) via Synaptic or command line:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread4

• Then open a terminal window and execute:

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

• Rebooting may be necessary.

After this, VLC will automatically use it. Some programs may need recompilation.

If after doing all this, you still get messages about not being able to play DVDs, check that the DVD drive has a region set (see below).

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the above worked fine. VLC now can read the DVD


Kaffeine also works!