Virtual Ubuntu on Mac

I'm writing this post from a Firefox browser within Ubuntu within a Parallels window on my MacBook Pro. So far... so good.

And while Parallels has made installing Windows XP onto your Mac a breeze, installing the latest version of Ubuntu (7.10) is not nearly as easy. First, look at this set of instructions for installing Ubuntu 7.10 in Parallels. Then, on top of that, you must note two other things...

• Giving the virtual machine more than 512 megs of RAM will cause it to hang during boot.
• If you try to boot the virtual machine in windowed mode, it will hang. You have to boot in full screen mode, then you can switch to windowed mode.

Also worth noting... the cool visual effects can't be enabled, networking sees my Mac but won't let me access its drives to get at the Mac files from Ubuntu. These can mostly be attributed to issues between Parallels and Ubuntu, not Ubuntu itself.

Some people have been criticizing Parallels for not supporting Ubuntu 7.10 (and by extension not supporting Linux, and by extension being part of a conspiracy against Linux). I see two problems with this. First each distribution comes with its own unique support difficulties. Second, Mac OS X Leopard releases this Friday. If you've only got so many people who can only do so many things, you're probably going to be focused on getting your product ready to support Leopard as best you can... and worry about the latest release of Ubuntu later.

But back to fun with Ubuntu...

Now, one of the common gripes about Linux in general is getting multimedia to work. And "out of the box", Ubuntu reinforces some of those gripes. But that's merely a nod to the fact that some of the codecs and software needed for multimedia have a little more complex licensing than Open Source software. Using the "Add/Remove" option on the "Applications" menu, you can just search for "restricted" which will bring you to the "Ubuntu Restricted Extras" package.

"Installing this package will pull in support for MP3 playback and decoding, support for various other audio formats (gstreamer plugins), Microsoft fonts, Java runtime environment, Flash plugin, LAME (to create compressed audio files), and DVD playback."

Basically, install that, and you've got everything you need to listen to your MP3s, burn new MP3s, browse Youtube, watch DVDs, run Java applets, etc... or so you'd think.

After installing it, I tested the MP3 support, found it to work nicely. I tested YouTube... awesome. Basically, if Flash and MP3 work, you've got most of the web handled.

Then I shut down to do some stuff. Rebooting later, I tried to play a DVD. The Totem media player was useless. It wouldn't play the DVD.

Totem told me I needed a DVD playback plugin and offered a link for more info. The page at gnome.org was next to useless in telling me which plugin I needed, where I could get it, or how to install it. It was basically a very techy page.

So I went back to the "add/remove programs" option. I did a search for "Totem" (the name of the movie player) to see if the plugin was a separate add on. Nope, but it did offer a different version of Totem with a Xine backend that said it played DVDs. So I installed that (which necessarily uninstalled the other Totem).

No dice. So I tried some of the other media players... VLC, gXine... none of them would play a DVD.

So I went back to the Gnome.org Totem page. I browsed through the page and saw, under "what are the minimum requirements" a mention of "libdvdcss for DVD playback" with an Ubuntu link in parentheses after it. I clicked that link which took me to a page at Ubuntu Help. I clicked on a link about DVD, then another link about playing DVDs, and that took me to a page with a link titled "installing libdvdcss2". It told me I had to go to a site called medibuntu, find a libdvdcss2 installation package there, download it, and manually install it.

So I went to packages.medibuntu.org, where they separated things into free and non-free. Thinking this DVD support must be non-free after all the dire warnings and silliness, I checked in that directory, but couldn't find it. Oh, it was over in the free directory in a libdvdcss subdirectory of a directory called libd.

I finally got it installed. Still, nothing worked. I uninstalled the xine based Totem and got regular Totem back. Hurray, the DVD played, but there was no support for the DVD menu or chapter systems, so I could basically watch the movie and use a slider to time search through the movie.

VLC wouldn't play it, but it was supposed to. So I tried the default action in these cases... I rebooted. When I booted back up, Totem was the same (video and time slider, no chapters or menu). But VLC worked great. Chapters, menu, etc.

I'm sorry if the licensing issues make distribution of certain codecs and decoders difficult. I understand that this is what makes it impossible for free Linux distributions to offer certain multimedia features "out of the box". But the helpers and instructions for getting a DVD player running easily needed to be more obvious and more easy. Even someone as techy as myself, who can jump through a lot of these hoops, found this difficult and disenchanting.

Before you think I'm going to call this a function that makes Ubuntu not ready for prime time, wait. Windows won't play DVDs either. At least not out of the box. The DVD player on your Windows machine is usually OEM software installed by the manufacturer of your computer. You can't actually download a functional DVD player with a functional DVD codec from Microsoft for free.

Try installing Windows XP on Parallels. Sure, it's really easy. But then try to play a DVD. Where's the DVD player? Well, Windows Media Player played DVDs on my last Windows machine. Let's try that. Nope. Let's upgrade it to the latest version (Media Player 11). Nope. Just says it cannot play the DVD because it doesn't have a decoder. You can close the error message or click a button for "web help".

The web page it directs you to says you need a compatible decoder and gives you a link to where you can buy one. Click the link and it offers you different options depending on your version of Windows. For Vista, there are two manufacturers offering you plugins for $15-40, and Microsoft also suggests you might want to upgrade to Vista Home Premium or Vista Ultimate where DVD decoders are included. If you have XP, it recommends 4 manufacturers who offer packages running from $15-50.

Now I'm not going to detail the purchase and installation process at each manufacturer, but considering that they're major names in Windows video (Roxio, Cyberlink, nVidia), they've got the process down. You can basically be up and running in 5-10 minutes.

But I wanted to go the "free" route like with Linux. Googling for a free DVD codec for Media Player, I found two options: Forget Media Player altogether and use a Windows version of VLC, or try the K-Lite Codec Pack. I decided to try the codec pack. It was a quick download and a quick install, basically following all of its recommendations. When it was done, I tried to play the DVD again... and it started playing... with no picture. I got the sound and could send it to the main menu, only I couldn't get any picture playback or in the main menu.

So I went for the standard solution for balky new installs... reboot. Start playing the DVD... no dice.

So I went and got VLC for Windows. Quick download, quick install, and the DVD played, although it was a bit jerky. I shut down Windows, edited the virtual machine to have more video RAM, then rebooted windows. That reduced the jerkiness, but didn't stop it. Then again, if you're booting up a virtual Windows on a Mac to watch a DVD in VLC instead of watching the DVD in the native Mac DVD player, there's something odd going on.

I can't say whether I might have had to hunt down a libdvdcss install for my Windows install if I hadn't installed K-lite, but I'm going to call the task of getting a decent DVD player running on Ubuntu or Windows in favor of Windows, but just by a hair. Still, good OEM support (if they set up the DVD player before the machine gets to the consumer) is going to be a help with either.

So, whether you're running Windows or Ubuntu, if you don't have someone else (the manufacturer of your computer) providing and installing DVD software, your machine won't play DVDs out of the box and getting them to play DVDs is pretty quick if you know what to do, but can be slow if you're trying to hunt down how to do it or following prompts from their built in movie players.

But in terms of being a valid, viable desktop competitor for Windows, the latest release of Ubuntu is knocking at the door... loud. Aside from Parallels-related problems and a slightly more confusing path to getting a DVD player running, Ubuntu is as "there" as any version of Linux I've tried, if not more so. If she was alive and wanted a computer, I'd give Ubuntu to my grandma.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Techno Thoughts.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.