I've been running Ubuntu as my main operating system for over 5 years now, and I must say I love it. However, every OS has its problems, and Ubuntu is no exception. Here's a few I ran into, and how I solved them (or not).

Lucid Lynx (10.04 LTS)

Adobe Flash

A while ago I noticed that a lot of my Facebook friends "liked" a page called "This Man Took A Photo Of Himself Everyday For 15 Years In A Row, Look at the Results!", or something similar. Curious as to what that was about, I clicked on the link. It transferred me to a page that, in addition to embedding the (rather cool) video "Living My Life Faster" by JK Keller (don't worry, harmless link), added itself to my "liked" pages without my approval...

Here is a list of some graphics software I find useful:

Raster graphics

The GIMP A cross-platform photo and image editor
Phatch A cross-platform photo batch processor
IrfanView An excellent image viewer and batch processor for Windows (which runs fine under Wine as well)

Vector graphics

Inkscape A cross-platform vector graphics editor, which is easy to use

After upgrading to Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, I was happy to notice that audio in all applications (including Skype) was finally working perfectly! However, I was less happy to notice that Pulseaudio was using quite a lot of CPU-time, and that the sound quality was absolutely awful... So I decided to give OSS4 a try. After some googling, installing a few packages and some minor configuration, OSS4 was up and running, and I must admit the improvement in sound quality is rather significant!

Creating and printing a multi-page CD booklet can be a bit of a headache. Firstly, not all programs support the re-ordering of pages required to make a foldable double-sided booklet. Moreover, the page-size is non-standard, which may give difficulties with commandline-tools such as Ghostscript and psnup. It took me a while to figure out how to do this on Ubuntu (Jaunty). Here's how you can do it:

• Create the pages as you normally would, using a program of your choice (e.g. OpenOffice.org Writer, Scribus). Make sure you set the page-size of the document to 12.1 x 11.99 cm.

A while back I wrote a course-reader in OpenOffice.org Writer on UbuntuWhen I submitted it for printing, it turned out that not all fonts were embedded in the document, which led to various printing- and layout-problems. Here's some advice on how to create PDFs that are suitable for printing by third parties.

OpenOffice.org

There are at least three ways to do this in Ubuntu. You will need the packages ghostscript (for all methods, but installed by default) and pdftk (for method 2), and optionally a Java Runtime Environment (for method 3).

Method 1: ps2pdf

The ps2pdf script that comes with Ghostscript is meant to convert PostScript to PDF, but it will happily take PDF-files as input. Just try: ps2pdf input.pdf output.pdf

The other day I found out I had misspelled a word in a whole batch of automatically generated PDF files. Regenerating all of them would be a lot of work, as the PDF files were plots created using perl/PDL, gnuplot and epstopdf (available in texlive-extra-utils), and the input data was scattered over about 20 different machines.

One of the drawbacks of Ubuntu (and Gnome in general) is that it hasn't got a decent font-manager yet. Moreover, since Gnome upgraded to the new gvfs (as of Ubuntu 8.04), the font viewer and manager that was available in previous versions (which could be reached by browsing font:/// in the file-manager) stopped working as well. This will undoubtedly be fixed in newer Gnome versions of course, but for now this leaves users of Hardy Heron and Intrepid Ibex without proper font management, which is kind of annoying.

For a couple of years there have been a number of great open-source programs around for encoding video, both in Windows and (Ubuntu) Linux. Some of them provide a nice graphical user interface, but the best ones are still commandline tools, such as ffmpeg and MEncoder. They are extremely flexible, but unfortunately also have a bewildering number of commandline options. This page lists a few invocations I regularly use.

Encoding PAL DV to MPEG-4 video