The Smorgasbord

Have you had problems playing .wmv Windows Media video files, or AVI’s after upgrading to Ubunty 9.04 Jaunty? I sure did, and you know I never had these problems before the upgrade at all. Totem would crash immediately on opening a video file, it would just close down unexpectedly. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t play mp3 audio either (but would stay open). I had the same problem playing Windows video and AVI files in VLC and mplayer as well – all video players on my system. Reintstalling the restricted repository W32 Windows Media codecs did absolutely nothing. My problem was with my Toshiba Satellite P105-S6167 laptop.

The good news is – I found a fix! Turns out the problem is with the Intel video driver that got updated in the Jaunty update. All you have to do is follow the instructions in the Reverting the Jaunty Intel Xorg video driver instructions (like I did) and everything will work again – NP at all! Thanks Ubuntu Wiki!

I got the Ubuntu error in update manager “Error failed to fork pty” when I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 8.04 to 9.04 yesterday.  That was quite annoying for 2 reasons, first because the bug, whatever it is, doesn’t allow you to open a terminal window either.  You get an additional error “cannot launch a child process”.  So I did a quick search of the Interwebs, and low and behold – the fix is pretty easy if you know what to do.  You have to edit the fstab (filesystem tab file) as root, and guess what – because of the bug, you can’t use terminal!

So here is your fix, this is all you have to do.  You can run a command in Ubuntu by hitting the keys “Alt+F2″ at the same time.

Once the window comes up – enter this command and click ok:

devpts /dev/pts devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620)


This hit “Alt+F2″ one last time and run this command:

sudo mount -a


Then you should be good, no reboot required!