Update your Nvidia driver to 310.19

Here is how to do that.

In short:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa 
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings

Then restart.

Firefox 11 for Ubuntu

There is an official PPA that contains releases of Firefox from the beta channel: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/firefox-next.

If you want to install Firefox from this PPA, execute the following commands:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-next
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install firefox

This tip is from here.

VLC 2.0 is out

How to install VLC 2.0 in Ubuntu

In short:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:n-muench/vlc
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install vlc

Install Midnight Commander from source

Problem
I’ve already noticed that the Ubuntu repositories are sometimes very out-of-date. A good example for this is the “mc” package. There is a PPA for Midnight Commander that should solve this problem but it’s also very old. At the time of writing (August 10, 2011), the current stable release is 4.7.5.3 while the PPA contains the version 4.7.0.9 (updated on Sept. 15, 2010).

Solution
Since I wanted to use a fresh release of MC, I installed it from source. Steps to follow:

• Download the latest stable source and unpack it.
• For a successful compilation I had to install this package too: “sudo apt-get install libslang2-dev libglib2.0-dev”.
• ./configure
• make
• If it was successful then you should have a binary “mc” file in the src/ folder. If it’s there, you can remove your current version with “sudo apt-get remove mc“.
• Then install the new version with “sudo make install“.

I also had to modify my .bashrc a bit:

# old:
#alias mc='. /usr/share/mc/bin/mc-wrapper.sh'
# new:
alias mc='. /usr/local/libexec/mc/mc-wrapper.sh'

Update (20120505)
Installing mc from source is now integrated in jabbatron.