image: Ubunto Logo ™ Ubuntu

I've been running Ubuntu since August, and so far, I'm quite happy with it. I'll be honest, though - it's not flawless, and there are some issues that require some command-line work in order to fix. I don't mind this, but as far as making Ubuntu a turn-key operating system, it certainly adds some large roadblocks for people who want to make the switch from Windows to Linux.

USB Playstation Controller

A friend of mine picked up commemorative Street Fighter 2 Playstation controller for me, unaware that I didn't own a Playstation. I don't plan on buying a Playstation, but I couldn't let a gift like this go to waste, so I went out and picked up a Playstation-to-USB adaptor.

Ubuntu didn't recognize the controller, so I hunted around until I found an article that provided a solution to the problem. There's actually a few possible solutions listed, so make sure to read the whole article before you start tinkering, unless you don't mind backtracking. If I recall correctly, my solution was to install kcontrol.

sudo apt-get install kcontrol

And that did the trick.

USB Canon Powershot A95

There's a known bug with certain usb cameras in the Gutsy Gibbon release of Ubuntu. The workaround is terribly complex - so much so that I didn't even bother. I'll just wait until they provide an official patch that takes care of the bug. In the meanwhile, my USB card reader works just fine, and it happens to pull data off the CF card significantly faster than when pulling pictures from the camera. I don't believe the camera has USB2 capability, whereas the card reader does... so I don't really care too much about this bug.

ZSNES

I like playing my old Super Nintendo Games with ZSNES, a Super Nintendo emulator that's available for both Windows and for Linux. For a while, I was playing the Windows executable version of the game through Wine, but after learning that there was a Linux port for the game, I figured I might as well use that.

While ZSNES works fine in most Linux distributions, it contains a slight bug when working with Ubuntu. It tries to access a nonexisting directory, so the solution is to manually create the directory. The specifics of the bug are found here.