Lineak – this is what you use to get the extra buttons on a multimedia keyboard to work. There is also a helpful page on controlling xmms here. You’ll want to install lineak-defaultplugin using apt-get to be able to control the volume.
Tweaking Ubuntu after the first installation – including how to install a decent music player, disable IPv6 in Firefox, and download a processor-specific kernel. More information on the xmms music player is available at the homepage.
It struck me that whilst trying to figure out how to set everything up, I really should have saved more bookmarks in case I need to do it again in future. Never mind.

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I have been meaning to switch to Linux for a long, long time now. The first time that I attempted to do anything about it was about three years ago, when I obtained the Mandrake 8.2 installation CDs (I had to order them through the mail, as I was still on dialup). The installation went okay (apart from the fact that I got confused when partitioning the hard drive, and ended up leaving a megabyte of free space on the Windows partition instead of a gigabyte (or something like that)) but when I got to first boot, there were two deal-breakers.
It didn’t detect my modem, and it didn’t detect the soundcard built into the motherboard.
The absence of the latter wouldn’t have been a problem, but the fact that I couldn’t get onto the Internet meant that trying to fix these two problems seemed like an enormous undertaking.
Of course, when I realised that my Windows partition was now unusably crowded, I had to reformat the whole thing. This put me off of switching to Linux for a few years, and I decided to make do with Windows for a while. It’s not perfect, but at least it works (or appears to, at least).

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About two years ago I stopped using Dreamweaver (MX) for constructing web pages. It was probably something to do with the fact that I had accumulated sufficient CSS knowledge to be able to abandon tables forever. While Dreamweaver was good at table-based layout, it didn’t seem to like CSS as much.
The whole WYSIWYG concept seemed a bit pointless too, so I went back to using Notepad.
For the last couple of years, it has been something of a struggle. I’ve been using the two text editors that come with Windows – Notepad and Wordpad. Notepad is lame as Girls Aloud, and WordPad always terrifies me, because I am worried that one day I’ll hit the save button and instead of saving as HTML, it will convert to Word 3.0 document format, with Times New Roman as the font and a 2.53cm page margin. I also really really missed the integrated FTP client in Dreamweaver. There was something truly elegant about right clicking on a file in the treeview and selecting “Put”, then sitting back and sipping tea as the connection was made to my webserver and the file uploaded to the right place in my clean and well-planned directory structure.
Ladies and gentlemen, today has been a good day.

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