Howto: Enabling DVD in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

This is completely illegal in the United States due to some copyright law. This site does not condone illegal activity; thus, if you’re in US, you’re on your own when you do the following.

Run the following command from the Terminal:

sudo apt-get install totem-xine libxine1-ffmpeg libdvdread3
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

You only need to this ONE time only.

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Fixed: Slow GUI (Compiz) on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) using ATI Radeon X300 Mobility

I finally managed to fix the issue as described in: Slow GUI (Compiz) in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) using ATI Radeon X300 Mobility

The solution revolves around:

  1. Download and install binary driver from ATI
  2. Remove the MESA driver
  3. Force aticonfig to renew the xorg.conf
  4. Make sure AIGLX and Composite is On/Enabled

Removing MESA Driver
Run the command:

sudo apt-get remove xorg-xgl

Run aticonfig
Run the command:

sudo aticonfig --initial -f

Check AIGLX & Compositing are enabled

  • Run the command:
    sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf
  • Search for the keywords ‘AIGLX’ and ‘Composite’.
  • AIGLX should be under ServerFlags section and the value should be ‘On’
    Options AIGLX 'On'
  • Composite should be under Extensions section and the value should be ‘Enable’
    Options Composite 'Enable'
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Slow GUI (Compiz) on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) using ATI Radeon X300 Mobility

I tried to install Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on my Dell Latitude D610 using the Wubi install method. Everything installs just fine, but I feel that the GUI is very slow. My Latitude D610 is using ATI Radeon X300 Mobility, which I think is not the best video card for Linux. Throughout my experience, Linux is more suited with the nVidia cards.

If anyone has every experienced running Windows XP using a VESA/default graphic card driver at high resolution, that’s how it feels. For those who are not familiar, it feels that the screen refreshes very slowly. For example, when I open up terminal, I can see rectangular dotted outline zooming out before the window pops out. After that it slowly draws the window decoration. Another example, when I scroll a web page on Firefox, the top part of the next page would be drawn first, then half a second later, the lower part is drawn. It is very annoying and almost rendering the GUI non-usable. FYI, the GUI is set with visual effects set to “None”.

I have tried to install linux-restricted-modules, xorg-driver-fglrx, xserver-xgl and the official ATI drivers but to no avail. I have run a check on the fglrxinfo and it’s fine. I even tried the glxgears, but only getting about 60fps.

I am still trying to fix the issue, and will update what I found out later on a separate blog entry.

UPDATE:Fixed HOWTO

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