I had a little trouble installing both Flash and Second Life on Ubuntu, since they seemed to want to use different versions of one particular library. But in the end the solution was astonishingly simple.

Download Second Life from getdeb.net. Choose your OS version and search for 'Second Life'. I got it working nice and fast, graphics looking wonderful, and with streaming music! For ages my experience has been 'choose any two of the three' making Second Life not so enjoyable. I'm looking forward to Esperanto lessons again, and hoping that the voice chat will work now.

In the end, Flash was as easy as:

$ sudo apt-get install nspluginwrapper flashplugin-nonfree

I tried all sorts of crazy wrapping techniques with 32-bit libraries and symbolic links, none of which worked. But the apt-get just did it all for me, very nicely. It's better than the Debian Lenny out-of-the-box Flash support which required me to press a ginormous PLAY button before Flash would load. This just works exactly as you'd expect it to.

Delighted though i am with Ubuntu, i have just today been informed of Dreamlinux which is another Debian-based distribution, but tweaked up to resemble Mac OSX. I think i might just have to try out the Live USB of that! :)

Update: Oh, and by the way, here's how to install Skype on a 64-bit Ubuntu Hardy Heron:

$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs lib32asound2 libasound2-plugins; wget -O skype-install.deb http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu; sudo dpkg -i --force-all skype-install.deb

Thanks very much to the Ubuntu forums for that piece of magic! :)