Tag: emulator

Install Netflix on Ubuntu via Wine

UPDATE: (Sept. 2014) – Netflix will soon natively support Ubuntu, there are only a few small hurdles remaining, likely to be resolved by the NSS update expected in Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic). A workaround is available for the impatient… http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/08/netflix-linux-html5-support-plugins.

For various reasons primarily related to DRM, there is not a native Ubuntu/Linux viewer for Netflix… this is one of the cases where WINE can help you out by providing (not emulating) a Windows environment.

These commands are for the Ubuntu setup, similar steps for other Linux distributions are available in the references.

I’ve found that it is better to pre-install the Wine Gecko and Wine Mono packages on Ubuntu.


sudo apt-get install wine-gecko
sudo apt-get install wine-mono

Then…

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ehoover/compholio
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install netflix-desktop

If you’ve never used WINE before within your Ubuntu/Linux environment, you’ll likely need to let it download the extensions for Windows, I believe that it will request to download and install the Gecko and Mono packages described above, click "Yes" if asked and all should go well!

REFERENCES:

Open Source Desktop Virtualization

Through the years, I’ve had to develop, maintain and support software on a variety of systems. Unfortunately, it’s often impossible to maintain specific software versions or configurations installed on physical machines. In the realm of web development, this becomes increasingly complex because of the rapid release of multiple browser versions.

To aid in testing, I’ve found that it’s often best to run these configurations in Virtual Machines, I’ve used VirtualPC and VMWare in the past, but have recently become a fan of Sun‘s OpenSource release of VirtualBox as it runs on a wide variety of host systems and supports most x86 based operating systems as clients.

Cheers

Atari 2600 Emulator

While it was not technically a personal computer, the Atari 2600 was one of the first pieces of technology that I had experience with in my youth. I’ll likely outline the progression of machines/operating systems in a future post.

I’ve heard about Stella for quite a while, but never had any time to fiddle with it. Recently I found that Ubuntu includes an installer for it and took a chance look. Other versions are available for MacOS and Windows.

I also found a few websites that contain ROM images for the emulator and was playing some of my old games in a matter of minutes.

For those legal types out there… I actually do own the games that I played, in fact, they are currently boxed up in my basement.

References:

Happy Retro Gaming!!!

WINE Is Not an Emulator

I post a lot about open source applications, WINE is another notable contender as it gives users an option to run many mainstream Window applications on a Linux (even Apple’s OS/X variant) platform by providing access to the Windows API’s to those host operating systems.

http://www.winehq.org/
http://appdb.winehq.org/ – List of applications supported

Ah, for those of you still running IBM’s OS/2 platform, you too can run Win32 applications with Odin:
http://odin.netlabs.org/

Cheers!