playing video

[thetractorking]

I am new to Linux, and really like it. Got to this forum by googling a question. I am running a late model Dell Inspiron laptop, and have set it up as dual boot. (Windows and the latest version of Ubuntu.) Use Firefox on both. Would love to never have to boot in Windows again, but---
Can't play videos in Hulu, or other sites. Don't know why, and don't know what to install to fix it. Can someone help me, please?

[MikeTbob]

Hello and Welcome
Congrats on making it this far, have a look at this link for lots of good info on setting up Ubuntu.
How to install popular proprietary software in Ubuntu

[thetractorking]

Thanks for the reply. The link was very helpful. However, when I went to enable the restricted extras, I got a message that I could not do that, because "this application conflicts with some installed software. Go to synaptic to resolve this issue."
I did. I don't know what to do next.

[MikeTbob]

You'll need to wait until someone with more *buntu knowledge comes along, mine is very limited.

[teenytinylinuxgrl]

Try this link too. It has some step-by-step stuff that is pretty easy to follow. It lets you add the repositories to Synaptic that have everything you need.

Don't be afraid of the command line either. It's awesomely powerful and simple enough for this 13-year-old newbie!

Let us know how it works!

Amy

[reed9]

I use Hulu all the time. All you need is flash installed.

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

Make sure you have the multiverse section enabled in your repositories, though it should be enabled by default in Jaunty.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu

You can get flash and a number of other proprietary packages through the meta-package, ubuntu-restricted-extras, as mentioned. You said you had an error message, though? Can you try again via the command line

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

and post the exact error message?

You might also be interested in trying Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, but includes (among other things) multimedia support out of the box.

Main Page - Linux Mint

[thetractorking]

Thanks for the tips. I'm working on that this evening, and will post tomorrow to let you know how it goes. I did got to synaptic and installed a couple of things.
I went to the Linux Mint site--looks cool.
Question: if I want to use Mint do I have to uninstall Ubuntu? How does that work?

[reed9]

Question: if I want to use Mint do I have to uninstall Ubuntu? How does that work?

I think it may be possible to add the Mint repos and "upgrade" to Mint, if you will, but it's probably more hassle and potentially more problematic to do it that way than to do a clean install. Unless you created a separate home partition when you installed Ubuntu, which you can then leave untouched, you will lose any files, etc, stored on the harddrive during the install, so make sure you make backups of anything you want to keep.

The installer is pretty much exactly the same as Ubuntu's, so setting up your dual boot is the same process as well.