Downloading Extensions
Download and install the Extension Pack from VirtualBox Downloads. Opening the file when it has downloaded should start VirtualBox and the installation process.

Added Users To Groups
You need to add your user to the vboxusers group. This can be done with the following command in the terminal

usermod bill -a -G vboxusers

Replace bill with your user name.

Restart your computer and Virtualbox will now allow you to connect USB devices to it.

Solution
If you do not have the directory “/etc/adobe” use the following command in the terminal

sudo mkdir /etc/adobe/

I like to use the terminal text editor but you can use what ever one you like.

sudo nano /etc/adobe/mms.cfg

Add the following lines

EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1
OverrideGPUValidation=true

Press CTRL+X and enter to save the file.
When you restart your browser the issue will be resolved.

Steam BETA
Valve have released the following information
Things have been going well. We will be having an internal beta starting next week, and a private external beta for 1,000 users sometime in October.

The private external beta will include:

Steam
One Valve game
Support for Ubuntu 12.04 and above
It will not yet include:

Big Picture mode
Additional Valve games
For existing Linux users, the external private beta is a good release for seeing where we are in running our games on Linux. We will be using a sign up page for the external beta. Information about the sign up will be announced in a future post.

For those new to Linux, we recommend waiting for a subsequent release where more features are implemented along with improvements to the user install experience.

Startup Applications
Open Startup Appications and click add. Call it Empathy IM or what ever you like in the name field and in the command add

empathy -h

The -h flag starts it hidden.

Not Accepting the Future
The old Gnome interface was not going to be continued by Gnome, there were some forks such as Mate. As soon as Gnome and Ubuntu made the decision to change their user interfaces so dramatically I was disappointed and made the move from a Gnome based operating system to KDE. Being a Mono developer I started looking at tool kits that support KDE. This became very hard as there is no supported GUI designer for KDE in Monodevelop and the tool kit of choice for Qyoto was not documented and supported very well either (I have written an article on C# Mono user interfaces here).

Making a Change
I stayed with KDE for quite a while and after an upgrade and a buggy Plasma Desktop I decided to make the change to a Gnome based distribution again. Mint 13 was the choice with a Cinnamon desktop. Cinnamon was still new and had it’s problems and I was willing to stick with it as they worked them out. I really enjoyed it and talked a friend into trying it but was starting to wonder what all the hype was about with Gnome Shell and Unity.

Starting to Accept the Future
I downloaded Ubuntu Gnome Remix and installed it in Virtual Box to test it out. I still had a hard time accepting it as it was new and different and decided to install it as my operating system so I would be forced to use it full time. It took a while but I started to really enjoy using it after finding the Gnome Extensions page and how easy it was to install them. I was even able to edit the Javascript code of one of them to look the way I wanted. I stayed with Gnome Shell for a while and completely customized it with themes, extensions, Gnome Tweak and Code. I thought to myself… if I was able to enjoy Gnome Shell after disliking it so much, maybe I should give Unity a fair go.

Ubuntu Unity
I tried Ubuntu with Unity in Virtual Box for a couple of days before making the decision to install it as my main operating system to force my self to use it and give it a fair go. I moved the close, minimize and maximize buttons to the right and added a menu button to the left of the windows. I disabled the global menu so the applications host their own drop down menus. I used MyUnity and Ubuntu Tweak to adjust the button bar transparency, remove the color from behind the buttons on the bar and change the size of the buttons.

I like the Lens feature of Ubuntu Unity and the arrows on the bar. This is what is keeping me from switching back to Gnome Shell. The ability to add new lens applications to the dashboard also is a plus.

Conclusion
Accepting Ubuntu’s Unity desktop is like having your first sip of Guinness Beer, you may not like it at first but it will grow on you.

Gnome Configuration Editor
If you do not have the dconf-editor, you can install it with the following command or use your package manager.

sudo apt-get install dconf-editor

Run the dconf-editor by clicking the icon in your applications menu, by opening a terminal or pressing Alt+F2 and using the following command:

dconf-editor

Untick the option “attach_modal_dialogs” at:

org.gnome.shell.overrides.attach_modal_dialogs

Restart The Desktop
Press Alt+F2 and type r in the text box then press enter. You now have dialogs that are not attached to parent windows that you can move.

Listing Your Files Recursively
The command I will be using to list all the files is find. To list all the files recursively in a directory use:

find /your/path

List AVI Files Only
To list all files with a certain file extension recursively use the -name option in find:

find /your/path -name *.avi

List Just The Files
To output just the file names and not the directory path add -printf “%f\n” to the end:

find /your/path -name *.avi -printf "%f\n"

The directories will still be listed as find enters the directory. To have only the files listed add -type f to find:

find /your/path -name *.avi -type f -printf "%f\n"

Sorting The List Alphabetically
To sort the list alphabetically, pipe the output to sort:

find /your/path -name *.avi -type f -printf "%f\n" | sort

Output The List To A File
To output the list to a file just add > /path/to/file.txt to the end:

find /your/path -name *.avi -type f -printf "%f\n" | sort > /path/to/file.txt

Adding What We Have Learnt To A Script
The script is going to take a command line argument which is the directory path to list, list the files recursively, sort them alphabetically and output them to the second command line argument which is the file to output to:

#!/bin/bash
echo "dumping a list of files from '$1' to '$2'"
echo "starting..."
find $1 -type f -printf "%f\n" > $2
echo "finished."

The output will be something like this:

./dumpfiles /Repository/Media/Media1/TV/ ~/Desktop/test.txt
dumping a list of files from '/Repository/Media/Media1/TV/' to '/home/bill/Desktop/test.txt'
starting...
finished.

Gnome Configuration Editor
If you do not have the Gnome Configuration Editor, you can install it with the following command or use your package manager.

sudo apt-get install gconf-editor

Run the Gnome Configuration Editor with the following command in the terminal or by pressing Alt+F2.

gconf-editor

Untick the option “attach_modal_dialogs” at

/ -> cinnamon -> windows -> attach_modal_dialogs

Restart The Desktop
Press Alt+F2 and type r in the text box then press enter. You now have dialogs that are not attached to parent windows that you can move.

Why It Does Not Work
Netflix uses Silverlight to play the streaming media and you may be thinking Mono has developed Moonlight which should make this possible but the problem is DRM.

What Is DRM?
The purpose of the DRM is to stop people from viewing the streaming media on an unapproved netflix player, stopping piracy or the service being used in a way Netflix disapproves of.

What About WINE?
I found a post by someone that got close to playing the streaming media using WINE but when the video started to play it was scrambled and crashed which makes me think this is an issue with DRM.

Native Linux Client
At omgubuntu there was a post where he was talking to 2 engineers that confided that Netflix was in fact working on native support for Linux and to expect to see it within the next year. He contacted Netflix to see if this was going to plan but was given then answer “There are no plans to support Netflix on Linux,” ~ Joris Evers, Director of Corporate Communications at Netflix”

A Microsoft Conspiracy?
Netflix is working on Google Chrome OS, Apple OSX, Windows, Android to name a few. There are some amusing conversations on the topic that state that this could be a Microsoft Consiracy such as: “I don’t think it’s quite so ‘back room’. Isn’t Netflix’s CEO on the M$ board of directors?”

So What Are Your Options?
The only way to get Netflix working so far on Linux is to use Virtual Box from what I have found. This means Netflix is not really running in Linux but it allows you to stay in a Linux environment and not have to boot into another operating system. Below is a screen shot of Man vs Wild playing in Netflix using Linux Mint 13 (Cinnamon).

UPDATE:
Erich Hoover has managed to get Netflix working through wine on Linux. This site has the instructions on how to install the patched wine via PPA. I would suggest that any one that uses this donate to Netflix Works On Ubuntu on Chipin which was the first thing I did when I found out it worked. Below is a screenshot Transformers Dark Side playing in Netflix running in wine through Firefox and Silverlight. It can be run in full screen mode but for the screen shot it is windowed.

A big thanks to Erich Hoover for all his hard work.

In Android
The first thing that needs to be done is to turn on USB debugging on the Android device. This option can be found by going to Settings -> Applications -> Development.

Install Packages
The MTPFS package now needs to be installed. It can be installed with the following command:

sudo apt-get install mtpfs

Device Vendor ID
To get the vendor id, plug in the Android device and use the command:

lsusb

The output should look something like this:

bill@Mint64 ~ $ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0502:3344 Acer, Inc. 
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 04d9:0499 Holtek Semiconductor, Inc. Optical Mouse
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 1532:0109 Razer USA, Ltd Lycosa Keyboard
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 041e:30d3 Creative Technology, Ltd Sound Blaster Play!

In the same line as “Acer, Inc.” you will see the number 0502, that is where you will find the vendor id.

UDEV Rule
Open up nano or any other editor, you can use the following command for nano:

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

Add the following line to the file remembering to use the VendorID that was in the lsusb output where 0502 is:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="0502", MODE="0666"

Fuse
The file fuse.conf needs to be modified, uncomment the line user_allow_other. The file can be edited with the following command:

sudo nano /etc/fuse.conf

You have to add your login name to the fuse group. Edit the group file:

sudo nano /etc/group

Look for the line fuse and add your name to it. It should look like this: (I added bill to the line)

fuse:x:104:bill

Mount Point
The mount point can be anywhere and one that exists can be used. To create one in the “mnt” directory use the following commands: (use your username where bill is)

sudo mkdir /mnt/a501
sudo chown bill:bill /mnt/a501

Mounting
The mount point can be added to fstab but I have created a small script to mount the drive and display the directory. If you are not using nautilus you need to change that line and if the mount point is not going to be /mnt/a501, that needs to be changed as well.

#!/bin/bash
gksu -S --message "Enter your password to mount your Android device." "mount mtpfs /mnt/a501 -t fuse -o user,noauto,allow_other"
nautilus /mnt/a501/