Download Flash Video in Ubuntu using get-flash-videos

Want to download and save flash video in Ubuntu? Here's how!

First off, grab get-flash-videos_1.24-1_all.deb from here

Open it and Ubuntu Software Centre will ask you if you want to install (I installed all the optional stuff afterwards, just in case)

For some strange reason the command to run the downloader is get_flash_videos with underscores and not get-flash-videos as you would expect. This can be fixed by using the terminal:

cd /usr/bin
mv get_flash_videos get-flash-videos

Videos get saved into whatever directory you are in when you run the command. To use the downloader: go to the page which contains the video you want to save, then copy (Ctrl-c) and paste the URL (web address) from your browser into a terminal (Ctrl-Shift-v) like this:

get-flash-videos "http://yoururlgoeshere.com"

(The quotes are needed if the URL contains characters such as &)

Enjoy!

Ubuntu Linux 10.10 Brightness Fix

Ubuntu 10.10 came out today, and the brightness controls on my NC10 stopped working again...

The fix - enable the voria repository and install samsung-backlight

How? Pop a terminal (menu > accessories > terminal) and do:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:voria/ppa

followed by:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

and then:

sudo apt-get install samsung-backlight

Reboot your machine, and voilà - working brightness!

NC10 Brightness Fix in Ubuntu Karmic 9.10

After installing Ubuntu 9.10 on my Samsung NC10 I was a bit annoyed to find the brightness keys (and also the applet) had stopped working.

I solved the problem by following this advice.

**Always a good idea to make a copy of the old file before you start editing!**

I used gedit (which needs to be run from a terminal using "sudo gedit", sans " marks) to add nomodeset to menu.lst (located in /boot/grub/menu.lst) on the end of the line which begins with # kopt=

Once you have saved menu.lst, run sudo update-grub, restart and...working brightness keys!

Using gphoto2 and Ubuntu to upload files to a phone

My aunt asked me to upload an mp3 (Satisfaction by the 'Stones) to her Nokia. The phone (Nokia 6300) has a USB mini connection so I plugged it into my netbook (Samsung NC10 running Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix) using the charging cable from my PS3.

The phone mounted fine (appearing as a camera for some reason) and I could browse the folders but Ubuntu wouldn't let me paste the file over, throwing a -108 error 'file not found'.

After a bit of searching I found a program called gphoto2 which solved the problem...