Enabling the right click on an hp pavilion dm4 with ubuntu 12.04

I have a 14" HP Pavilion dm4 laptop and like most of my laptops, the mousepad always seems to have some type of problem at the beginning. On the dm4 my problem was that the right click didn't work. after finding an askubuntu.com question about it I found that I needed to run these three commands.
synclient RightButtonAreaRight=1
synclient RightButtonAreaBottom=1
synclient AreaBottomEdge=3500

Sadly, I can not expound really on what the synclient command does, I just know that I needed to run all three before it would work and I have to run them each time I reboot (I'll try and figure out how have it stick even after rebooting and edit this post when I do.)

Installing the psmouse alps driver in ubuntu 12.10

I recently upgraded to ubuntu 13.04. Couldn't get enough things to work the way I wanted, and the way they used to be, and so subsequently backed up my home folder and reinstalled 12.10. Since I had to reinstall the psmouse-alps driver for my mouspad to work with a scroll I decided to blog about it.

I searched and the best answer I found was in this link. The answer I used I believe was the third one down. It was the one with the install.sh script in it.

First off, you need to have the right kernel stuff installed.(Yeah I know, really technical). Look in your /usr/src folder and see what kernel you are using. e.g. before I install the driver mine showed

linux-headers-3.5.0-17

if this is all that shows up(and it probably will be) you will need to install your specific kernel's generic package.. I ran

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-3.5.0-17-generic

To install it you will also need to have dkms installed you can simply:

sudo apt-get install dkms

Once all that is installed, download the alps driver. Here is the link(hopefully it doesn't change).
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BzNsvDx_ae6bQnFLQkNFT0dWc3c
Uploaded it to my drive account too just in case.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwdxaDKyG0KSWmpEaTZqUU9zMkk/edit?usp=sharing

Once downloaded, navigate to the directory in which you downloaded it. then:

sudo cp psmouse-alps-dst-0.4.tar /usr/src
cd /usr/src
sudo tar xvf psmouse-alps-dst-0.4.tar

after extracting the go into the source directory:

cd psmouse-alps-dst-0.4

The instructions the person on askubuntu gave was to simply run

sudo sh install.sh

for some reason this didn't work for me when I tried it and it required a few extra things to do after. I also need to run these commands each time I start the computer so I put it in a script. Open up your text editor of choice (vim) and write these lines:

 #! /bin/bash
dkms add psmouse/alps-dst-0.4
dkms autoinstall
rmmod psmouse
modprobe psmouse

save the file, then make the file executable:

chmod 755 name_of_script

and run it:

sudo ./name_of_script

After that I simply went to System Settings->Mouse and Touchpad and then changed the settings as desired in the Mousepad tab (which wasn't there before).
Voila! And magically I could now enable multi-touch and scrolling with the mousepad.

Mounting USB in Ubuntu Server

So I put Plex Media Server on my laptop that I installed Ubuntu Server on for the purpose of only running Plex Media Server (the monitor broke). The only problem with hosting the media server is my laptop hard drive isn't big enough to hold my media library. It does however fit on an external USB drive (for now, though I might need a bigger one in not too long). So I decided to see if I could run it with the media library on the external drive. The only problem was mounting the drive. I realized I had no clue how to do that from the command line really. So I searched for a way to do this. The answer wasn't very difficult and was explained well on the ubuntu wiki here. just two commands:

sudo mkdir /media/external

To create a mount location and, since the drive was formatted with ntfs:

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /media/external

to mount the drive. To find out which device it is (in case it isn't sdb1) you can run

sudo fdisk -l

to find which one it is.
I tried pmount and various other tools but this one seemed to be the only one that really worked well and did what I wanted it to. I believe with it being ntfs it will give the user permission to the drive. Whereas if it was some type of fat system you would need to finish it off with the -o flag and some arguments.

And to unmount the drive (which I never really do since it is my library) you simply:

sudo umount /media/external

Playing a blu ray disk with Ubuntu 12.04/12.10/Mint 13

Found myself with a slight problem trying to play a blu ray disk on my laptop. crunched down, here is what I had to do to get it to work. Added a vlc repository, I'm not sure if this was necessary or if the following commands would have been sufficient but it's what I did.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:n-muench/vlc
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install vlc

I then had to install the correct codecs for blu ray

sudo apt-get install libaacs0 libbluray-bdj libbluray1

I then needed to create an aacs file and download a certificate/key.

mkdir -p ~/.config/aacs/
cd ~/.config/aacs/ && wget http://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name/files/KEYDB.cfg

After that I simply opened up vlc (my prefered media player, especially for movies) went to Media>Open Disc...

Then I selected BluRay under Disc Selection, then in the dropdown menu I selected the correct device. I also read that it is important make sure the 'No disc menus' box is checked. Then hit play and enjoy the show!