Firefox 3.1 beta on Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope

  I have been testing Jaunty for a few weeks now and I like everything but the intel graphics. ( that is another story). This week I decided to try the new firefox. 

  The first thing I did was download an addon called 'Nightly tester tools". It can be downloaded from here.  This addon will allow your firefox extensions to remain compatible with the beta version of firefox even though the addon is not designed for it. I should warn you now that your current addons may fail with the beta version of firefox but, I think you can expect that if you are running beta software.  I did find firefox 3.1 beta in the ubuntu repositories and I quickly installed it.  Clearly this was not the way to go. None of my extensions or themes worked and the back button was greyed out.  Multiple crashes every few minutes. As far as I was concerned, this was not even alpha software.

  Next I went to the firefox website and downloaded the beta from there.  I un-tared it to my home folder with

tar -zxvf firefox-3.1b3.tar.bz2

  The contents are now in a folder called firefox in my home directory.  Inside that folder is a file called firefox.  Double clicking this file will launch the new firefox. You can create a link on your desktop to this firefox file or just browse to the folder and double click if that works for you. When you first start the new version your extensions will be checked.  Chose the option to override all compatability.  This will ensure that your plugins and themes will still work.

  I have been using it on both my work pc and my laptop at home and so far everything is very nice. It seems to be much faster that firefox3.0 and very stable too.

  As always... Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Handy command line utilities and other stuff

Every once in a while I find a command that I could have used a couple of days ago. You know the one. Remember that time when you were trying to do something like killing a process or unmounting a stubborn usb drive? That is what I'm talking about. Whenever I find myself needing these commands I can never find where I have written them down or what file I saved them to. So I though I would create a page where I can store them. I know other sites have more of the same thing but I think this page may end up being more of a notepad for me than a place to share. Anyway, I hope you find some of them as usefull as I have.

Eject a sutbborn usb drive or mounted folder.

fuser -k /media/Path-to-mounted-directory/

Enable Ctrl+Alt+Backspace in Jaunty Jackalope (disabled in the alpha)

dontzap --disable

Create a session that will output all of your commands to a text file. This will save the session to a file called "typescript" in your home directory

script <enter> Type "exit" to end session

To find a running process type

jobs

To kill the process type

kill %1 or kill %<job-number>

Want to see who you are connected to? (you may have to install iproute)

ss -r

Record a screencast and save it as an mpeg

ffmpeg -f x11grab -s 800x600 -i :0.0 /tmp/screencast.mpg

Shutdown a windows pc from a linux pc

(courtesy of shell-fu.org)

http://www.shell-fu.org/lister.php?id=839

Start a webserver serving the directory you are currently in.

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

How to stream mp3 files to a remote machine.

  (The command on the client must be run first. If not it will just give an error.)

On the client/listening side do

nc -lp 1234 | mplayer -

And on the server/sender side do

cat <name of mp3 file.mp3> | nc <ipaddress of remote pc> 1234

New Linux Logo

Need I say more.

Migrating to New site

  For those of you who were redirected here from the old site, the content is still here but the url's have changed.  If you are looking for an article that was on the old site, please navigate this site and I am sure you will find it.

  Thank you for your patience and I am sorry for any inconvenience.

Quote

  I am not sure who to quote here but I heard this today.

  "People don't realise how cheap a professional is until they hire an amature to do the job."