However, the one thing that has puzzled me the last couple of weeks has been random websites loading in Firefox as I was scrolling web pages (with the two-finger multi-touch functionality), or sometimes even an error dialogue saying the URL was invalid and could not be loaded.

It turns out that this is because the touchpad sometimes interpreted my scrolling as a middle-mouse-button click – which (previously unknown to me) causes Firefox to load the text in the clipboard as a URL.

This behavior is easily disabled by going to about:config in the address bar, searching for middlemouse.contentLoadURL, and changing the value to false.

Hopefully this might help anyone experiencing the same issues as me. There is more info on the middlemouse.contentLoadURL property at MozillaZine.

I had previously been using the mplayer mozilla plugin, and although playback worked, it was quite choppy (it didn’t seem to buffer too well), and I could not pause/resume or seek.

My first thought was to look in the Medibuntu repositories, and sure enough, there was a realplayer package – unfortunately it seems that this did not include the mozilla plugin.

My next try was to look at the RealPlayer for linux website, but it only has a download for the 32-bit version. I did notice that there was a link to helix player for other platforms. Helix player is an open source media player on which RealPlayer is based. I tried helix player, but this can not play back proprietary codecs (and therefore not the real stream from the BBC website), however it did include a mozilla plugin!

I tried a combination of both – I installed RealPlayer from the Medibuntu repositories, and installed the mozilla plugin from the helix tarball to my home directory. And it works!

Instructions follow:

1. Enable the Medibuntu repositories.
2. Install the RealPlayer and libstdc++5 packages:
   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install realplayer libstdc++5
3. Load RealPlayer (Applications > Sound & Video > RealPlayer), and in Tools > Preferences, select the hardware tab, and set the audio driver to OSS. Press OK, and close RealPlayer.
4. Download and unpack (into a temporary location) the Helix Player for AMD64 – I grabbed the linux-2.6-glibc23-amd64 tar.
5. Copy the contents of the “mozilla” folder to ~/.mozilla/plugins (in your home directory – you may need to create the plugins folder).

Update: Looks as if I may have jumped the gun a bit – looking at the files installed by the medibuntu realplayer package, it does indeed look as if it comes with the mozilla plugin. I do not know why it wasn’t working for me (maybe it places it in the wrong location?) – but I am running fine with the above solution (even if it is a bit messy).