Eva's Great Guide to Ubuntu – Part 4

A. Install proprietary software

Skype 2.1 Beta 2 (2.1.0.81)

Install Skype from the Official Website (.deb) or from the Software Center (you may have to activate the parter repositories).

Sync and share files with Dropbox

Dropbox is a great cross-platform application to share, store and sync files online and between computers. The software is amazing and they offer 2 GB free software space, without file size limitations.

Installations instructions here. (.deb or repositories)

Google Earth 6.0 Beta

Google earth used to be installable from the medibuntu repositories, but this seems to be passé. Download the most recent version of Google Earth from the official website.

Thankfully it now comes as a .deb for 32 or 64 bits distributions (it used to be a quite unpractical .bin installer).

There seem to be a bug which prevents Google Earth from running:

usr/bin/google-earth: 43: ./googleearth-bin: not found

A possible fix is to install the lsb-core package.

Google Earth 6.0 Beta is remarquably unstable. You may prefer to install the previous 5.2 version.

Adobe (Acrobat) Reader

The default pdf reader, Evince, should be fine for almost everything. It is already installed in your default Ubuntu. Evince is also much faster than its closed source competitor.

However, Adobe Reader is also available. Download it from the official website. As Google Earth, it used to come as a .bin installer, but is now also available as a .deb package.

B. How to install Virtualbox

It is possible to install the Open Source Edition of VirtualBox directly from the Package Manager. However, VirtualBox OSE does not include USB support, so that I recommend installing VirtualBox by downloading the latest version from the official website.

After installing VirtualBox, you may need to restart your computer. You may need to restart to see the "Oracle VM VirtualBox" menu entry appear in the menu. Alternatively, run VirtualBox in a terminal.

For Virtualbox to work properly, you have to be in the group "vboxusers". Add yourself to this group using the following command:

sudo adduser your_user_name vboxusers

To share any folder as a network drive, just enter the following command at the MSDOS prompt:

net use x: \\vboxsvr\your_shared_folder

(Though it works well on Vista, mapping network drives on Windows XP seems to be broken lately.)

C. Force the package architecture

Problem: you are running Ubuntu 64 bit, and the software package you want to install is 32 bit.

The Software Center will give you the following error message:
Error: Wrong architecture 'i386'

This actually happens with quite a lot of programs, for example: IBM Lotus Symphony, Amazon MP3 downloader, the excellent game World of Goo, ...

Solution: install the package from the command line with the --force-architecture option:

sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture NameOfPackage.deb

For example:

sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture skype-ubuntu-intrepid_2.1.0.81-1_i386.deb