Another Opinion Among Many

Now that Firefox 3.0 is out, I bet there will be a ton of reviews of this milestone release.  I must say that it seems to be a lot more stable than it was.  The Mozilla team have really created an interesting monster this time.  I’ve been using the version on and off since it was first branched in the trunk.  it was scary to run at times back then.  I must say, though, that, since the RC1, its been quite stable and I don’t even know if I remember when it crashed, which is more than I can say for any of the 2.x versions.  I am not going to go ahead now and review what I’ve already commented on in earlier posts.  Kudos to the Firefox team, I say.  Now, guys and gals, can you somehow get your heads out of your asses and provide a switch to turn off your “improved” address bar?  Its the ADDRESS bar, not the “lets search any goddamn browser/search slowing term that you’ve ever typed or not tymed so that we can be your browser of choice for longer than you want us to be” behavior??? That’s my only peeve about the 3.0 version of Firefox.  The address bar is no longer an address bar.  Its a way to make you think Firefox sucks.  Give us a choice!

Of course, I write this in the new and improved, but hardly hyped, Opera 9.5 Kestral. The Wordpress editor is still funky in Opera, but its a lot better than it was.  Like, what’s the deal with you hitting “enter” like you would in any other browser to go to the next paragraph or thought and to be thrown to the TOP of the paragraph you just wrote? That behavior’s just gotta stop! I do like all of the other reasons that I’ve liked Opera, though.  Its FAST and its FAST.  Yes, its fast.  Pages seem to want to render like they’re supposed to and they arrive in front of my face in a speedy way.  Its too bad that it crashes on java applets all the time, though.

Damn, this is starting to look like a review. Its not - its just a rant. Rant, I say!

I just wiped my website’s directory (on purpose) and replaced the whole thing, to what I think is, with just the files I want.  Perhaps that will satisfy the nagging bug that came from the hole in pre-2.5.1.  Let me know if anything doesn’t function as expected.  Thanks.

I thought that I’d follow up on my complaint about the non-working PenguinTV on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. From a forum post, I found a workaround:

In a terminal, type export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/firefox and then export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox and then execute PenguinTV: PenguinTV &, which allows the program to find what its looking for.

That’s a bit arduous, so why not automate it? I did so, and it is really a hack, but I thought that I’d share it with you. Anyone who has created bash scripts before (or batch files in Windows/DOS) will find this to be quite trivial, but there are many out there who still haven’t “gotten their feet wet”.

So, the first thing that you’ll want to do is open your favorite editor. For quick and dirty scripts like this one, I use nano, as many systems have it included and the learning curve is quite small. So, for nano, you would open a terminal and type nano -w Pengi. I use Pengi as the name for my script. you can use whatever you want. The -w flag for nano causes it to continue beyond the border of your terminal when writing a line, keeping you from truncating a long command. Its not really necessary for this script because the commands are quite short, but its a good habit.

Here’s what you put in your editor:

#!/bin/bash

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/firefox

export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox

PenguinTV

Save the file.  Ensure that you’ve typed each command on a new line.  Then change it to executable with a quick chmod: chmod a+rwx Pengi

You can now open PenguinTV on the command prompt by typing /home/your-username/Pengi
That’s not the end of it, though, right?  You want your nice little icon to execute the file when you click it, I am sure.  Whether I use Gnome, KDE, or XFCE, I’ve become accustomed to putting a quick launch for my favorite applications on the taskbar for easy access.  This is the case for PenguinTV as well.

Its quite easy, in these desktop environments, to change the attributes of an application launcher.  Its even a tad easier than when using Microsoft Windows, as you don’t have to remember to put quotes around the application path.  So, you would right-click the PenguinTV icon and select “properties” from the menu.  In the “path to executable”, you would replace “PenguinTV” with “/home/your-username/Pengi" (without the quotes, of course) and click OK.  You should be in business and PenguinTV should open with the right environment variables to launch successfully.

Have you had a problem with an application that you got from outside the approved Ubuntu mirrors? Did it refuse to run? Did you know that you can execute a program from a command prompt by typing its name and hitting ENTER? Did you know that most programs will give you extra info via the -v (verbose) switch?

I have recently had that problem with a rss aggregator named PenguinTV. Its nice and simple and will grab just about any audio or video feed, like Miro, without the heavy system requirements (it uses the default apps to play the media, for example, instead of handling that itself). Its ideal for podcast fetching. The problem is that the version that is available in the software showcase does not work without telling the program some things that it should figure out itself. I tried the solution on the forum post about the same problem that I’d encountered of trying to get the latest .deb from the project’s home page. However, I was getting a “bad syntax” error.

This is because Ubuntu has switched from bash as its default shell to dash (lighter and faster, closer to the original ash shell). On nearly every distribution of GNU/Linux, /bin/sh is a symbolic link to /bin/bash, so nearly all executable scripts in /usr/bin will begin with the shebang #!/bin/sh. With /usr/bin/PenguinTV, open it up with a text editor as root and change the shebang to #!/bin/bash and it will run, as the developer is using bash!

…now if I can only find out why it sometimes core dumps…(I just found gPodder, which might be the ultimate solution)

As anybody who’s bored enough to read even my blog knows, I am no stranger to software testing.  I’m no programming genius (that would be Lloyd, Westi, Matt, Linus, Devin, and others) at all, but I know how to find a bugzilla or bug reporting tool, and I do my best.  I’ve not alpha or beta tested Wordpress since 2.3 was released, as I’ve been concentrating more on Ubuntu lately (and there are some really nice touches that Hardy Heron is going to present to the world, very nice).

I’ve remained subscribed to the WP-testers mailing list, though, and I’ve been reading every post.  It looks like Wordpress is going to be a lot more friendly to the new user and have a lot more power for the power user.  I’m not sure if this blog will go through any more trauma or not.  I may keep with a stable (older) version until support is stopped.  But, I may move another over to 2.5 and see how easy it is to do the hard things.  BTW, there’s a lot of good discussion about it on the latest Wordpress Podcast

Will you be switching right away?

I am playing around with an old Acer AcerNote Lite.  Its not got a lot going for it by today’s standards.  It is a cute little laptop, and was likely quite a nice little item when new.  It would have come originally with Windows 95 on it and I am certainly not going to even try to reinstall that (I’d have to have the floppies).  The specs are:

• 120mhz Pentium processor
• 8MB system RAM and 32MB RAM module
• 1GB HD
• Chips & Technologies video
• Floppy
• no CD Rom

This should be interesting.  So far, I’ve gotten the Debian Etch floppies to start an install.  We’ll see how it goes.  I’ve got to get a 16 bit ethernet PCMCIA card to proceed any further, as I’ll need to get the rest of the system off the internet.  Perhaps I’ll try for DSL and see if I can do the floppy netinstall hack mentioned in the forums.  Wish me luck!

So, a few weeks ago, Ubuntu “upgraded” Firefox 2.0.0.12 (which is a decent release) to Firefox 3 Beta and I couldn’t view any java applets any more.  The reason is because some of the file paths are changing and the plugins need to be linked to a different spot.  I had to try Opera but it crashed.  That left me with Konqueror, which is not native to Gnome, for the time being.

That has just changed.  I just found Bug #173966 and there was a hack proposed that helped me to get back on track.  The solution, for now:

cd  /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/

ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so .   <–note the “dot”

Your plugin path might be different, but that’s where one place mine can be found (actually, its a symbolic link to the plugin, which is in  /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so)