Installing packages from the web in Ubuntu

Without further ado I shall dive straight in with the warning that whenever you install a piece of software you should trust where you are getting it from. If you’ve chosen to use Ubuntu then presumably you’ve decided you trust the Ubuntu development process, but when you click on a link to download some software from a web site you need to be sure you’re on the correct site and that you trust those that run the site.

OK, with that out the way, I thought that I’d do a quick blog about the ease of installing .deb packages within Ubuntu (clearly I’m in a bit of a blogging mood today – something of a rarity!). I first stumbled across this a while ago when I decided to install the Opera browser alongside my usual Firefox install. I headed off to the Opera website to download the .deb file that I knew, from previous Debian installs, would be there. What I was expecting to do was download it, do a test install run with aptitude -s to check for any missing dependencies and then, after installing any missing items, install Opera – all via the trusty, familiar command line.

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Extra Codecs for Xine on Debian

More of a note to self, but I thought I’d blog it since I haven’t for a very long while! Anyway, I finally got around to patching in a few extra codecs into my Debian install the other day and it was surprisingly easy.

Not entirely sure whether working with it symlinked is necessary, or whether simply creating it as win32 would have done. It works OK though, so I’m not really complaining!

So why haven’t I linked the download? Well I’ve just checked it and there’s been an update, so this looks to be the latest version:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20060501.tar.bz2

So I’m downloading that for an update!

Splitting the Atom

OK, a very quick update here to note that I’ve made a few modifications to my Blosxom install. First off I’ve added a calendar plugin (currently on the left hand side). Nothing fancy, but looks to do the job – and I’m hoping that the movement between months will present some live links once I’ve got some posts in more than just the single month!

The second one is the new Atom feed. This is partly a stop gap pending getting an RSS 2.0 feed working properly, but I’ll probably leave it there. This took a little bit of playing around with to get it working, but in the end all that was needed was installing XML/Parser.pm which came in the libxml-parser-perl Debian package. This brought a small selection of other packages with it, but I’ll investigate that later 🙂