Ubuntu and maven2

I don't know how I missed this but I just discovered that maven2 is available in the current unstable release (Hardy Heron).

So, happy Hardy Heron users, if you want to use maven2, installation can be pretty straightforward:

$ sudo apt-get install maven2

Et voilà! After a few seconds and the download of a bunch of new dependencies and files, maven should be installed and working correctly. This can be verified using the following command:

$ mvn --version

Which should should print something similar (at the time I'm writing this) to:

Maven version: 2.0.8
Java version: 1.6.0_06
OS name: "linux" version: "2.6.24-12-generic" arch: "i386" Family: "unix"

It's not that it's complicated to install maven manually and I was happy with my current setup and will keep it for various reasons (mostly because I'm using 2.1-SNAPSHOT) but a well integrated package is always nice and helps: no ENV variable to set up, no PATH to modify...

Actually, this is precisely one of the reason I really like Ubuntu : Apache, Java, Ruby, Python, Scala, Groovy, PHP, Maven, Ant, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Tomcat, Glassfish, Subversion,... you need something? just "sudo apt-get install" it.

Ubuntu is definitively a great development environment!

Note: Gutsy Gibbon users can try the backports available in Matti Lindell's Personal Package Archive as mentioned in this comment or wait for the release of Ubuntu 8.04 which shouldn't be a big issue as it will occur in a few days now.

No Sound Issue in Firefox Flash [Fixed]

I love Ubuntu but one thing was really pissing me off on my desktop computer: the very annoying No sound in Firefox Flash issue which I'm facing since I upgraded from Feitsy to Gutsy.

But tonight, because I felt frustrated again because of this issue, I googled it one more time, hoping to find something new. A few minutes later, I found a link to a How To Fix The No Sound Issue in Firefox Flash post in the ubuntu forums and decided of course to give it a try.

The post suggests to update the libflashsupport library with a patched version from Paul Betts who is a software engineer at... Microsoft working on hotfixes and updates for Windows :) Anyway, I just installed Paul's version and guess what: sound is now working again in Firefox Flash! Thank you both guys, this is so sweet!