Edubuntu video playback and apt-get

Question

They had installed some modified Edubuntu's at school.

So I have some questions about setting some things up:

1. How can we play HD videos? They are made for Windows machines and are in WMV format but we need to play them in our multimedia class but I don't know how - which player, which codecs, etc.

2. How to properly edit the /etc/apt/sources file? Anything we try to install via apt-get it just says that E:\ is not available. Which repositories should be put in there so we could be able to install some tools?

3. Where are viruses/trojans usually put in Ubuntu? I mean in which directories? Because our computers are behaving really slow and we need to check for malware manually - we are not even allowed to install any kind of anti-virus software. What are the usual directories and places for hiding such files, how are they hiddem, how to recognize them, etc.?

4. Any others nice tricks/tips that we need to know.

Answer 1

OK:

1. You will need to install some codecs using - sorry! - apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-* ffmpeg. I use the Arista Transcoder app to convert videos on Ubuntu, and it works quite well. The only problem is that you may have to install some codecs - . If you can't do that, you'll need to use a video converter on Windows, or perhaps try downloading MEncoder or FFMpeg separately, and converting with them.

   I would suggest converting to Ogg Theora if the converter program supports it.

2. The GUI way: System->Administration->Software Sources. The CLI way:

   $ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
   

   Substitute nano for your favourite console editor - nano is by far the easiest if you aren't familiar with console editors, though.

3. Viruses and malware are practically a non-issue on Linux systems. There are many different places it could hide. If you do have a virus problem (unlikely, IMHO), realistically you will need a virus scanning app. (Here's a review of Linux anti-virus programs from a recent Linux Format.)

Answer 2

For the codecs, you could try the "Ubuntu Restricted Extras" package in your package manager. For the sources, E:\ is a Windows filepath, *nix uses filepaths starting with / as root, and partitions/drives are mounted under /mnt or /mount, generally.

There are very few viruses/trojans for *nix, and even if there were, there wouldn't be "standard" directories to hide them any more than there is on windows - if they were easy to find they'd be very bad viruses :)

As for the 4th option, your questions make me think you're thinking about ubuntu like it's windows. You should stop doing that, it isn't - it does many things very differently. Forget everything you know about windows, because most likely it isn't relevant.

Answer 3

As for #3: what are the specs on the computers?

For #4: If you don't have sudo access, then you can't install codecs or software through the package manager.

You can compile and run programs in your local user account, but I think the only language installed by default is Python.