Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

I came across a funny screenshot today that provides a pretty clear example of how social engineering is used to con people (in this case, Windows users) while browsing the Internet (click for full size):

Clearly, this user is not running Windows XP but Ubuntu Linux.  Yet with their pop-up blocker disabled in Firefox 3, a malicious website presents a window that mimics a “real” warning.  But it’s actually a trap.  This is probably the most common reason viruses find their way into Windows systems — by exploiting a users lack of expertise and susceptibility to intimidation on a technical level.  So fair warning to you Windows users out there.  Fortunately for our Linux user, he’ll just laugh and close this window.  If you’re a Windows user and you see an alert like this, you should close it too (but run a virus scan using something like AVG immediately afterwords).

Well shit (see the comments).  Looks like the deb file I was linking to was taken down at the request of Real.  However, there is another way to install Real Player.

Step 1:

Visit this link and copy/paste the correct line of text (depending on your version of Ubuntu) into a terminal window to add the third-party repositories to your software sources list:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu#Adding the Repositories

Step 2:

Visit this link and download the appropriate deb file for your systems architecture (i386 or AMD64):

http://packages.medibuntu.org/intrepid/realplayer.html

That’s pretty much it!  Enjoy!

Here be old, out of date instructions with timeless joke: 

You probably remember Real Media Player from back in the hay days of the middle and late 1990s while browsing the Internet using Netscape Navigator (at least I was) on a dial-up connection.  Well it seems Real is still alive and kicking.  Just recently, I was shocked when I discovered that a torrent I had downloaded actually contained files in Real format.  I really thought everybody had gotten with the times by now and switched over to Divx/xvid codecs.  Then again, Real Media was originally intended to be a format that could be streamed over a network, and not downloaded first to be played later.  Which means if you really do remember actually using Real Media for anything in the 90s, it was probably from a video chat with a stripper.

Bandwidth was not the only thing squeezed in the 90s (ba-dum ching!).

Let’s get on with this post, shall we?

There are guides out there that show you how to download the binary executable (a *.bin file) of a Real Media Player installer, aimed towards multiple versions of Linux, but this requires you to open that dastardly terminal window and type a bunch of greek.  Instead, you’d probably like a deb file that you can just double-click on and be done with it.  Well, I’ve found one originally posted here on Ubuntu Forums.  You can download the file here from this link and either run the file right out, or save it to your desktop first and double-click on it to get the ball rolling.

Once its installed, you’ll find a new shortcut for it in Applications>Sound and Video>Real Player 11.

But you might encounter an error; something along the lines of “cannot execute child process (realplay), file or directory does not exist”… I’m paraphrasing.

If this happens, here’s how you fix it:

System>Preferences>Main Menu

Select the Sound & Video category on the left side, then Right-Click on RealPlayer 11 and click “Properties”.  This will open up a little window that looks like this:

In the above picture, the Command: line says “/opt/real/RealPlayer/realplay”.  This is what yours should say, but it might not.  If it doesn’t, make it as I have it, and that should do the trick.  Then click Close twice, and you’re done!

Now, I wonder if CBS’s Big Brother still does the SuperPass deal where you can watch all the contestants live 24/7.  I can still remember the live feed of those babes who fashioned bikini’s out of peanut butter during Season 3…