Updating Firefox and Thunderbird in LMDE

A couple of weeks ago, as you may recall, I switched from ever-changing Ubuntu to nearly frozen Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). So how is it?

Nice. Not only does it have the Gnome 2-like MATE desktop, but because it is based on Debian Testing (currently known as jessie), LMDE is relatively slow to change.

What's irritating about LMDE is that, because it is based on Debian Testing, it is relatively slow to change.

This really isn't too much of a bother, except for Firefox and Thunderbird, which change versions at the drop of a hat, not that anyone wears a hat they can drop anymore. So, for example, as of this moment (it could change by tonight), Firefox is on version 23, and Thunderbird is on version 17.0.8. LMDE's versions, OTOH, are at 21 and 17(.0.0).

OK, this is not one of life's big tragedies. Most updates of Fox&Bird do not involve major changes. But I like to keep a little more current.

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this which won't do too much damage to your installation even if it completely craps out. The details are all in this LMDE forum post and the one above it, but I've added a little twist of my own, based on a post even further up the topic than the ones I've already mentioned and linked to.

What makes this relatively easy is that LMDE stores Firefox & Thunderbird files in the /opt directory, since pure Debian doesn't support them under their default names because of trademark issues (see iceweasel and icedove). That means any mucking around you have to do is confined to /opt, rather than such touchy directories as /usr/lib and the like.

So what to do:

1. Install Fox&Bird, if you haven't already:
   $ sudo apt-get install firefox thunderbird (N.B. If you haven't already installed Firefox or Thunderbird, and don't miss them, you might ask yourself just what you are doing reading this post.)
   
   
2. Become the superuser and go to the /opt directory.
   sudo -i
# cd /opt
   
3. Back up the firefox and thunderbird directories. This lets you get back to the original versions if you frak everything up. If you are particularly paranoid, back up your $HOME/.mozilla and $HOME/.thunderbird directories in the same way.
   # cp -rp firefox firefox_21
# cp -rp thunderbird thunderbird_17.0 The -rp options recursively copy everything and preserve all permissions and time stamps.
   
   
4. Optional step: Change the ownership of firefox and thunderbird. If you do this, then you will be able to update both programs without becoming superuser. Otherwise, you'll have to launch the apps using sudo to do the upgrades. Technically this a regression, as it allows someone to update a core component of the machine without root access, i.e., it behaves like Windows XP. On a single user machine this is probably not a big problem.
   
   Assuming your username is, say, capaldi,
   # chown -R capaldi:capaldi firefox thunderbird If you do this step you can now get out of su mode:
   # exit
logout
$
   
5. Now for the trick. You need to put Fox&Bird into the release channel:
   $ vi /opt/firefox/defaults/pref/channel-prefs.js When you get here, look for a line that says
   pref("app.update.channel", "default"); and change default to release.
   
   
6. Do the same thing for
   $ vi /opt/thunderbird/defaults/pref/channel-prefs.js In my copy, this was already set, which is why Thunderbird kept asking to update (and always failed, since it I wasn't root).
   
   
7. Restart either app. In the Help menu click on About Firefox/Thunderbird. Updates should appear normally, though I had to go through the process a couple of times to get a successful update. In Thunderbird it took forever to do the update, but when I Xed out the update window and restarted Thunderbird it was properly updated. I'll let you know if this trend continues with the next update, which might occur as early as this week.
   
   
8. Now if and when LMDE does push Fox&Bird updates, all of your lovely work will be overwritten. You can do that by locking the package. The easiest way to do this that I know is:
   
   
   1. Open synaptic. If you don't have it,
      $ sudo apt-get install synaptic
      
   2. Search for firefox and click on it.
      
      
   3. In the synaptic menu bar, click Package.
      
      
   4. Click Lock Version.
      
      
   5. Search again for Firefox and make sure it is locked. The whole Firefox line should be red.
      
      
   6. Repeat for Thunderbird.
      
      

And that should do it. Remember, if things get messed up, you can always use your backup directories to get back to the default distribution, or you can do complete remove/reinstall:
$ sudo apt-get purge firefox thunderbird
$ sudo apt-get install firefox thunderbird

An Infinite Number of Browsers

It's hard to believe, but even in this day and age some websites insist that you must use some version of Internet Explorer before you are allowed to enter, even if the site uses no special features of Windows or IE (e.g. ActiveX).

This is the rational behind the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox.

The Switcher comes with a default set of browser ID strings: IE6, Opera, and Netscape, I believe. But what if you want more? What if you need to see if a site will recognize IE on a Mac running OS 9?

Thanks to Matt Parnell's post, I've found a site which will solve all your problems. Just go to Tech Patterns, download this file, and install it using the directions in Parnell's blog. Now you have a gazillion (more or less) browser possibilities. The Tech Patterns forum has some suggestions as to how to use them.

A Firefox Annoyance

Just because software is highly rated, open source, and generally better than the opposition doesn't mean that it can't be annoying.

Case in point, Firefox. I clicked on a PDF link and got a message which, paraphrased, was:

The file /tmp/foobar.pdf could not be opened because the helper application was not present.

OK, the helper application I used before the upgrade was Acroread. I haven't bothered to load up the binary as yet, so, indeed, it's not present in the system. This should be easy to fix, but when I go to Edit=>Preference=>Content, and click the “Manage” button after “Configure how Firefox handles certain types of files” I don't see PDF files. Even though Firefox admits that there should be an application.

All is not lost, though it's pretty hard to find. To fix this bug,

$ cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/insertyoursetofrandomnumbershere.default
$ grep "acroread" *

Which returns, in my case

mimeTypes.rdf:                   NC:path="/usr/bin/acroread"
mimeTypes.rdf:                   NC:prettyName="acroread" />

Kill Firefox. Edit the mimeTypes.rdf file. In my case I replace acroread by evince, but you can use xpdf or even gv if you like. Restart Firefox. Click on a PDF link. It should come up.

Problem solved, but it's not something I should have to do this way.

X-ing out Tabs

In Firefox/Swiftfox 2.0, by default the active tab has a big red "X" beside it. Click on the X and the tab disappears. The disadvantage of this is that one can't delete a tab without making it active. A more desirable behavior would be to have an X in each tab, so you can delete the tab without opening it.

This hack is not mine, so I'll reference Geek to Live, where I found it. What you do is:

1. In the address bar of the browser enter about:config
2. In the Filter box that appears, enter the string browser.tabs.closeButtons
3. Right-click the string that appears, and select Modify
4. Change the number to "1" if you want an X in each tab, or to "3" if you want the Firefox 1.5 default behavior (one X, all the way to the right on the tab bar). Experimenting, "0" is the default 2.0 behavior, and "2" is no Xs at all.

The change should take effect as soon as you hit enter.

Deleting the Double Green Line

Many blogs and web sites have been displaying ads in what I find is an annoying fashion. Selected words are underlined twice in green. When you run your mouse over them, an annoying popup appears, advertising something. Here's a random example.

(My favorite was a blog which had a phrase something like "overall this method works well," where overall was underlined and offered to sell me blue jeans with bibs.)

There outta be ways to block these things, and there are in fact many. These popups all have the name IntelliTXT on them, someplace. They are so ubiquitous that Firefox 2.0's Google search offers 11 different versions of the string "IntelliTXT *", most of which have to do with blocking, removing, or disabling the things.

As it turns out, Wikipedia has a good "stub" article, which includes blocking information. In my case, the easiest way to block everything is to use the Adblock extension for Firefox. Just add the string "*Intellitxt*" to Adblock's filter, reload the offending page, and the double green lines are gone.

Wikipedia: It's not just for truthiness.

Things I Never Knew About Firefox

Oy! Didjaknow, if you press the backspace key in Firefox it will take you back to the previous page you'd accessed from your current tab? Just like clicking on the left arrow at the top of the window.

Except that this is currently broken in Linux versions of Firefox, and, by extension, Swiftfox. Fortunately, there's an easy fix, as is pointed out in the article: under about:config, change the value of browser.backspace_action to zero. Thank you, ubuntonista.

P.S.: From the comments, I learn that Alt-Left Arrow also goes back. Logically, Alt-Right Arrow goes forward. Since I'm an old Emacs-do-everything-from-the-keyboard person, I'm mortified that I didn't figure this out myself.

Swiftly, My Browser

I've decided, for the time being at least, not to upgrade to Ubuntu 6.10 ("Edgy Eft"), instead staying with the Long Term Support version 6.06, "Dapper Drake." Nothing particularly against Edgy, just that it's awfully soon to upgrade, even for a former Fedora user. Anyway, there will be another Ubuntu, version 7.04, "Feisty Fawn," available around April. I'll probably upgrade then.

But this failure to upgrade on my part means that I'll be "stuck" with some older versions of software. In particular, Firefox will be stuck with the 1.5 series, although the current release is 2.0.

I wanted to at least try version 2.0. I could download the binaries directly from the Firefox site, but they wouldn't be in Debian package format and wouldn't automatically upgrade. I've heard that there are sites that package Firefox into .deb, but I found that Swiftfox, the Linux & CPU optimized rebuild of Firefox, has its own Debian distribution page. Indeed, by adding the line

deb http://getswiftfox.com/builds/debian unstable non-free

to /etc/apt/sources.list you can auto-upgrade Swiftfox with apt-get or synaptic.

But Swiftfox comes in different versions for different processors. Which one do I have? That's not too hard to find out. The first thing I did was

cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 15
model           : 2
model name      : Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.20GHz
stepping        : 7
cpu MHz         : 2193.109
cache size      : 128 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 2
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid
bogomips        : 4391.39

which tells me that this is an Intel Celeron (duh), cpu family 15. That's fine, but on its installer page Swiftfox gives me a choice of three Celeron packages:

• Celeron (Willamette, Northwood, Celeron D), which maps to the Pentium 4,
• Celeron M, which maps to Pentium-M, and
• Celeron (Coppermine, Tualatin), which is a Pentium 3 knockoff.

Of course, I know mine is a cheaper version of the Pentium 4, but if you're really curious about your CPU, Wikipedia defines family 15 as the "Northwood" line of processors.

So edit /etc/apt/sources.list, run

apt-get update && apt-get install swiftfox-pentium4

and we're set to go. You may want to do a little tweaking to get all of your pluggins in the right spot, but Swiftfox will run properly.

The best thing about Firefox/Swiftfox is that the browser has a large number of extensions that increase its capabilities. In the 2.0 line these are actually in the Tools => Add-ons menu. Every once in a while I like to take stock of what I have installed, and why. So here goes:

• Adblock: Lets you remove annoying advertisements, or other junk, from web pages. Highly useful for getting rid of Flash advertisements.
• BugMeNot: Adds a right-click option which queries the BugMeNot database to find a login and password that works on a site you haven't registered. Not available with the rest of the extensions, you have to look for RoachFiend.
• Colorful Tabs: Makes the tabs different colors. Not as useful as it sounds, but pretty.
• CookieCuller: Lets you manage cookies. Specific cookies, e.g. a password cookie for your Google account, can be protected, and will remain when you clean out other cookies
• Download Statusbar: Highly useful. Replaces the annoying popup window with a bar at the bottom of your browser that fills itself in as you download a file.
• Forecastfox: Weather information directly on the browser.
• Sage: An RSS reader that lives in your sidebar.
• translator: Right-click the little German flag at the bottom of your browser and you can translate the page into the language of your choice. This version lets you open the translated page in a new window or tab.
• Unread Tabs: Tabs you haven't yet visited are in italics, making them easier to identify.
• User Agent Switcher: For the brain-dead sites that "require" Internet Explorer but use no other Microsoft software. This makes them think you're an M$ groupie.
• VideoDownloader: This lets you download videos from YouTube, Google Video, etc. You can view the resulting file with mplayer if you have the proper codecs installed.

Bringing Up PDF files in Firefox

Recently Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper Drake) pushed the update to Firefox 1.5.0.7. I had been using Swiftfox, but I was tired of searching for the new upgrades myself, so I went back to the Firefox supplied with my distro. (Of course, Firefox 2.0 is out. I'll get to that when I upgrade to Ubuntu 6.10, aka "Edgy Eft.")

No problem. Except that when I tried to open a PDF I got ... nothing.

Well, not quite nothing. I got a brand new Firefox window. Blank.

I found similar tales of woe in the Ubuntu Forums. No help there.

Finally, in frustration I launched Firefox from the command line an clicked on a PDF file. I got the usual blank window, and a set of error messages from Adobe Acroread, mostly coming down to the fact that it didn't like the way it was called.

Well I wasn't necessarily trying to call Acroread. I'd never successfully opened a PDF file with this version of Firefox. And anyway, I was previously using evince.

N.B.: At this point I should probably mention that after I downloaded 1.5.0.7, my settings in ~/.mozilla/firefox were so hopelessly fraked up that I deleted the directory and started over. This means I hadn't saved the previous preferences, which turns out to be part of the problem.

So what's calling Acroread? The only obvious thing I have installed is mozplugger, a sort of super-plugin for Mozilla & Firefox that tries to make your Linux box handle plugins as if it were a PC.

So I looked in the file /etc/mozpluggerrc. (Why? Because I've played with mozplugger before. Now you know the trick as well.) Sure enough, inside the file was a set of lines telling ol' moz' how to handle PDF files:

application/pdf: pdf: PDF file
application/x-pdf: pdf: PDF file
text/pdf: pdf: PDF file
text/x-pdf: pdf: PDF file
      repeat swallow(documentShell) fill: acroread -geometry +9000+9000 +useFrontEndProgram "$file"
      repeat noisy swallow(Xpdf) fill: xpdf -g +9000+9000 "$file"
      repeat noisy swallow(gv) fill: gv --safer --quiet --antialias -geometry +9000+9000 "$file"

The line that has "acroread -geometry +9000+9000 ..." is the key. This is the command mozplugger uses to launch PDFs if acroread is present on the system. It also has a lot of flags that the current version of acroread doesn't like.

So there are to possible fixes:

1. Change the offending line. I replaced it with
   
   repeat swallow(documentShell) fill: acroread "$file" then restarted Firefox and clicked to open a PDF file. Firefox still brings up the blank window, but it also launches acroread and I can read the PDF file.
   
   Note that you can use any other PDF reader that you want here, it doesn't have to be acroread. Some of the other options are given in mozpluggerrc, as you can see above.
2. Tell mozplugger to stop working on PDF files. This is fairly easy:
   1. Comment out (with a "#" in the first column) or delete all of the lines referring to PDFs in /etc/mozpluggerrc.
   2. Quit Firefox, if it's running, and delete the file ~/.mozilla/firefox/pluginreg.dat. This will let Firefox bring its plugin database up to date the next time you start it.
   3. Start Firefox, and try to open a PDF file. You'll get the usual dialog box asking what you want to do. Give it the path to your favorite PDF reader and check to box to always do this.
   4. Now PDFs should launch normally.

In retrospect, it looks as though Ubuntu must have updated Firefox and Mozplugger at about the same time I decided to use Firefox rather than Swiftfox and to trash my ~/.mozilla/firefox preferences. The combination of factors messed up reading PDF files. The tail end of the Ubuntu Forum post linked above is the short version of this story.

Wanted: New Reddest Red State

I've long called my home the Reddest Red State, but that is no longer the case. Following the defeat of Jim Ryun yesterday, Kansas now has:

• One Democratic Governor,
• Two Republican Senators, and
• Two Democrats in Congress out of four:
  (Map adapted from NationalAtlas.gov's Map Maker.)
• A school board which believes in evolution (for now),
• And a Democratic Attorney General (which probably has Vern Miller spinning in his grave).

OK, the Gov has a Republican family name and the AG is a renegade moderate GOPer, but still. Maybe the book for this campaign will be We're Not in Kansas Anymore.

Oops, the previous version of the map had the 2^nd and 3^rd districts switched. Oh, well, it's not like I never published a paper with an erratum before.

New Version of Firefox

So many things, so short a time until Doctor Who comes on SciFi.

First thing, there is a new version of Firefox (1.5.0.3) out. If you don't auto-update, update manually. Now. It's a Security Update.

Of course, that also means that there is now a 1.5.0.3 version of Swiftfox.

I know, I promised to test if Swiftfox is faster than Firefox. I never really did the test, but Swiftfox hasn't crashed on me, and it's certainly not any slower than Firefox. Has anyone done any real timings?

Faster Browsing?

Something I stumbled upon while looking for something else:

Swiftfox is a rebuild of the Firefox source code, using optimizations appropriate for Linux and your AMD or Intel processor. There is a version 1.5.0.2, which I installed in the same way I installed Firefox 1.5.0.2, except that the directories are now named swiftfox instead of firefox.

Is it really faster? I'm not sure, but it certainly seems faster. And so far all extensions work. I'll play with it a while and see how it goes.

Interesting, Swiftfox is linked to the Central New York SPCA, and if you like the code you are requested to send a donation to CNYSPCA.

Updating Firefox and Opera

The Washington Post's Security Fix Blog reports that there are updates for both the Mozilla Firefox and Opera web browsers.

Firefox actually has two updates: users of version 1.0.7, which is distributed with Ubuntu Breezy Badger, can upgrade to 1.0.8. Presumably this will make it to the Update Manager, but it wasn't in today's updates. Users of 1.5 or 1.5.0.1 should upgrade to 1.5.0.2. We'll talk about that here.

Note that in Linux you aren't notified of the availability of this download, as you are in Windows, so you have to look for it. Going to the Firefox Home Page reveals a button which tells you the current version of Firefox available for download, 1.5.0.2. Clicking the button starts the download. Mine downloads automatically go to ~/downloads, a location that can be set in the Preferences.

I keep the current copy of Firefox in the directory /home/local/firefox, where local is an account where I keep software that isn't installed via deb or rpm and doesn't need to run as root. So the first thing is to move the old version of firefox, then unpack the new version:

$ su - local
Password:  xyzzy123
$ mv firefox firefox_1501
$ tar xvzf ~/downloads/firefox-1.5.0.2.tar.gz

Now you've got a new version of firefox in /home/local/firefox. If that directory is in your path, then your old "firefox" command should launch the new version.

There are a couple of tweaks necessary, though. First, I want to copy all of the searchplugins I've added from the old firefox to the new:

$ cd searchplugins
$ rm *   # removes anything already there
$ cp ../../firefox_1501/searchplugins * . # you could use ln as well

Second, I want to use all of the plugins that I have in the old plugin directory. This is a little more difficult since most of the plugins are actually just soft links. So here's what we do:

$ cd ../plugins
$ ls -l ../../firefox_1501/plugins
lrwxrwxrwx  1 flashplayer.xpt -> /usr/lib/flash-plugin/flashplayer.xpt
lrwxrwxrwx  1 libflashplayer.so -> /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so
-rwxr-xr-x  1 libnullplugin.so
lrwxrwxrwx  1 mozplugger.so -> /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/mozplugger.so
lrwxrwxrwx  1 nphelix.so -> /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/nphelix.so
lrwxrwxrwx  1 nphelix.xpt -> /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/nphelix.xpt

Note that libnullplugin.so is already available. Then link each plugin as needed:

$ ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/flashplayer.xpt
$ ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so
$ ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/mozplugger.so
$ ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/nphelix.so
$ ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/nphelix.xpt

Now Firefox is ready to role. The first time you launch the new version it will check for any updates needed to your extensions, and display a welcome screen. From then on it's back to normal.

This upgrade will be a lot easier when 1.5 becomes part of the standard Ubuntu distribution. This happens when the "Dapper" distribution is officially released, not for a while yet.

---

I don't have Opera installed on this machine yet, so let's see what we need to do. First, check the Synaptic package manager to see if it is available via Ubuntu. It is, in version 8.5.1, though the current update is 8.54. So first let's get opera running in any fashion. Launch the package manager

$ sudo /usr/sbin/synaptic

search for Opera, and download. You'll get a warning that opera can't be authenticated; ignore that. If you don't have the xlibs package installed, it will be.

Now Opera runs, but I get errors telling me that the Motif package manager and plugin need to be installed. Let me do a search for that and I'll report back to you later.

Firefox 1.5.0.1

You may recall that I had some problems with Firefox 1.5, so much so that I went out and got the bleeding edge development version to get rid of the bugs.

Well, good news. The bug fixes have now propagated back into the 1.5 series with the release of Firefox 1.5.0.1. I've decided to get off the bleeding edge and go back to the stable Firefox tree, at least until I find a bug.

So, as I once promised, it's time to tell you about the wonders of Firefox.

Uh, it's a browser, Dave

Well, right, Hal, but what a browser. It — it —

Yes?

It browses the web, frak it!

So do Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Galeon, Amaya, Nautilus, Lynx, etc., etc., yada, yada, ad infinitum, Dave. Then there's something called Internet Explorer.

Well yes, Hal, but Internet Explorer is for Windows, and we don't even let the XP box upstairs use it.

True, Dave. But what about the other browsers I just mentioned. You know, – ahem – I have all of them. Why don't you use one of them?

Well, Hal, because Firefox has extensions: A bunch of nifty little add-ons that let me customize the browser.

Ah, I see, Dave. So what extensions do you have loaded up?

Thanks for asking Hal.

Just wanted to get to the point of the article, Dave.

OK. Here's the Firefox extensions currently installed on Hal-whose-name-isn't-really-Hal (Hey!). All of them are available under the Tools=>Extensions>Get More Extensions menu, in no particular order:

• Forecastfox: Puts icons of current an future weather on a Firefox toolbar.
• Sage: An RSS/Atom feed aggregator.
• Translate Page: Calls up Google's translation service to convert a foreign language page to English.
• User Agent Switcher: Fool websites into thinking you're running IE.
• CookieCuller: A Cookie manager that lets you save the cookies you want to save and delete the ones you aren't crazy about.
• AspellFox: Runs the aspell spell checking program on input boxes. Useful for spell checking posts like this one.
• BugMeNot: is supposed to access the BugMeNot web site to get instant login information. So far I haven't been able to get it to work.
• Adblock: Block selected advertisements, or advertising sites, from appearing in your browser window.

And there you are, ladies and gentlemen, the Firefox extensions.

Thanks, Dave.

You're welcome, Hal.

Positioning Firefox in FVWM Windowspace

Finally, I've figured out how to get FVWM to put the Firefox browser where I want it when I start up my system.

A little background. As you probably have figured out by now, I use FVWM as my Window Manager in Linux. It's endlessly configurable, and does exactly what I want it to, when I want it, independent of what someone else thinks should be the default behavior of by desktop.

And yet, ...

Some applications are easy to position on an X11 desktop. For example, open a shell window, and run this command:

$ xterm -geometry 80x25-0-0 &

You now have a terminal window in the lower right corner of your screen. It's 80 columns wide and 25 rows wide. If you'd try

$ xterm -geometry 80x25+100-50 &

the window would appear 100 pixels from the left edge of your screen and 50 pixels from the bottom.

The old Mozilla browsers used to obey this type of command, but neither Mozilla, Netscape, nor Firefox do anymore. This presents a problem. When I log on to this machine, I open and FVWM desktop which is 9 times bigger than my terminal screen. I'd like specific applications specific places when I log on. If you excuse my ASCII art, I'd like the thing to look like this:

|----------|----------|----------|
|       0,0|       1,0|       2,0|
| Evolution| Emacs    |          |
|          |          |          |
|----------|----------|----------|
|       0,1|       1,1|       1,2|
| Firefox  | Ical     |          |
|          |          |          |
|----------|----------|----------|
|       0,2|       1,2|       2,2|
|          |          |          |
|          |          |          |
|----------|----------|----------|

Where Evolution is my mail client, Emacs my editor, Firefox my browser, and Ical is a calendar program, though probably not the one you're thinking of. Each square, of course, represents a physical screen on the 3x3 virtual desktop. I can switch between them by scrolling the mouse past the edge of the screen.

Now Evolution starts at the first page of the virtual window, so I can just call it up in the usual manner. Emacs and Ical recognize the geometry command. I've got 1024x800 resolution on my screen, I can get these three programs to start up where I want them by adding this to my ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc file:

AddToFunc InitFunction
+ I Exec evolution &
+ I Exec emacs -fn 9x15 -geometry 81x42+1264+25 -T emacs &
+ I Exec ical -geometry +1024+800 &

But what about Firefox? If it respected the geometry option I could add another line:

+ I Exec firefox -geometry +0+800 &

But Firefox doesn't use -geometry. So what to do? For years I've brought up Firefox after I logged onto my system, insuring that it would go where I wanted it.

Today I found out about a FVWM command called StartsOnPage. It tells FVWM to start a certain "Style" of command on a specific page on your virtual desktop. See those little numbers in my desktop picture above? 2,2 is the lower right-hand screen, 1,0 the middle screen on the top, etc. I want to put Firefox in screen 0,1. This involves StartsOnPage, but I didn't know how. Then I found this post, which explains all, or at least enough for my purposes. What I need to do is make sure my ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc file has the lines:

Style Gecko StartsOnPage 0 1, SkipMapping

AddToFunc InitFunction
+ I Exec evolution &
+ I Exec emacs -fn 9x15 -geometry 81x42+1264+25 -T emacs &
+ I Exec ical -geometry +1024+800 &
+ I Exec firefox &

The "Gecko" style should work with Mozilla, Netscape, Galeon, ..., any Gecko-based browser, which includes Firefox. The "0 1" means start in window 0,1 on the above grid. I'm not sure what SkipMapping does, but it doesn't seem to hurt anything.

And now, when I log on, Firefox appears where I want it.

Finally.

Firefox 1.5

I got tired of waiting for Fedora Core to move version 1.5 of the Firefox web browser from the development tree into "updates," so I went and installed my own copy, in /home/local/firefox.

When it's launched, Firefox 1.5 (hereafter FF1.5) comes up with an error message,

Firefox could not install this item because of a failure in Chrome Registration. Please contact the author about this problem.

This turns out to be a known bug. The solution (which will be in the next release) is to create a file

/home/local/firefox/extensions/talkback@mozilla.org/chrome.manifest

after which the error message should vanish.

Other than that, FF1.5 works pretty much like FF1.06. Some of the menu options are a little different, maybe better, maybe not, I haven't decided as yet.

I was going to go on about the wonders of FF1.5, except that in the middle of listing all of the wonderful extensions I loaded up, the browser crashed — not just itself, but X11 as well. I had to do ctrl-alt-F1 to get to a text console, and reboot from there. This happened yesterday, and the day before, and yada, yada, yada. This turns out to be another bug which will be fixed in the next release. It's fixed in the nightly builds, now. (It's a Linux-only bug, apparently.)

But I think I'll wait until then to tell you about the wonders of Firefox.

Update Firefox

Bad news: Firefox has a bug involving the use of international characters in URLs.

Good news: there's a fix.

So, boys and girls, update Firefox or use the workaround in the above links.

Until the official Firefox 1.5 release, Windows users will have to upgrade manually. Fedora Core, however, had a fix available via $ yum update this morning.

Firefox Hanging?

While I love using the Firefox browser, here at home it has one problem: it takes an awfully long time to load some pages, and if, say, I've got Google News open in one tab, the other tabs will sometimes freeze while it reloads. In extreme cases, the browser "gets stuck" for a while, and in the browser window is a beautiful picture of whatever the last window I clicked on had in it. It doesn't happen at work, for some reason.

I don't know how to describe this behavior concisely enough to send in a bug report, so as a temporary fix I Googled ''firefox hangs linux'' and found this thread, which tells me to:

• Enter about:config in the browser bar, and
• set network.http.pipelining to true

I don't know if this will cure my particular problem, or not. I'll let you know.

Spellchecking in Firefox

Sometimes you've got to enter a lot of information in a form on a webpage, as I'm doing now to enter this post. I am one of the world's worst spellers, so it's useful to have spell-check capability available. Now Blogger has a little spell-check button above this box, but it opens a popup window, which is generally regarded as Unmitigated Evil, so I try to avoid that.

Now, however, comes a Firefox Extension known as AspellFox, which uses the aspell command along with an xterm window to do your spell-checking. The extension adds an "AspellFox" item to your context (right-click) menu, enabling you to spellcheck what you type. Since it uses aspell, it automatically uses the personal dictionary you've created on your own computer, so you don't need it to tell you how to spell Mehl or Papaconstantopoulos (look it up).

Unfortunately, it only works with aspell and xterms, so it's of little use to Windows users. Sorry about that.

When it's finished, it pops up a window saying Spellcheking done!. Hmm.

Linux, Firefox, and rtsp Revisited

Without a doubt, the most-accessed entry in this blog is one I did on getting the rtsp aka RealPlayer protocol to work with Firefox. Don't believe me? Go to Google, enter "firefox rtsp" in the search bar, and then hit "I'm feeling lucky."

Anyway, as a result of feedback I requested on that post, I've got some new information. You don't have to edit configuration files buried three levels deep to fix this. No, you just have to do a little bit of mouse clicking to change the configuration file from your browser. This post describes the procedure for Mozilla, but the same trick works in Firefox, to wit:

1. In the address bar of your browser type the string
   about:config
   and hit return. You'll get a long confusing list of options. Some are in bold, some aren't, but don't worry about that.
2. Right-click anywhere in the display area. A box will appear. Click on the New option.
3. Another box will appear. In it, type
   network.protocol-handler.app.rtsp
4. Yet another box will appear. In it, type
   /usr/bin/realplay
   or the location of whichever program you want to work.

That's it, RealPlayer should now work. You can check your work here.

Windows Users! I note that some of you have been searching for a solution to this problem as well. The problem seems to be in RealPlayer, not Firefox. If you go to Word_Whore, scroll past the politics, and look at the bottom of the post, you'll see that you should enable Real-Time Streaming Protocol by clicking on "Preferences=>Advanced=>Other Media" in RealPlayer and enable RTSP.

Hope this works, I haven't tried it myself on a Windows machine.

Firefox Extensions and Themes

Yesterday, for unknown reasons, Firefox decided to change the fonts it was using to view the web. As I said, I don't know why this happened. At least this time it wasn't a total meltdown. I went through all the usual operations of going to Edit=>Preferences=>General=>Fonts&Colors, and eventually got the screen looking so bad that I could barely read it.

OK, something that's not supposed to be in the Unix philosophy: rip it out and start over. Well, not totally. I kept the current Fedora Core version of Firefox (1.0.4), but ripped out my settings, carefully preserving certain files:

1. move the ~/.mozilla directory to ~/.mozilla_old
2. Start Firefox
3. Set up starting home page
4. move bookmarks.html, user.js, and chrome/userChrome.css from ~/.mozilla_old/firefox/xxxxxx/ to ~/.mozilla/firefox/yyyyyy/
5. Reinstall extensions and themes.

Did it help? Not much. I suspect that some upgrade to the Linux fonts wasn't as aesthetically pleasing to me as it was to the author. Eventually, I hope, I'll track down the fonts I want. Strangely, the fonts in other programs, e.g., my Evolution mailreader, weren't affected.

What the exercise did allow me to do was to figure out which Firefox extensions and themes I wanted to keep. As you probably know, extensions add functionality to the browser, while themes change the look of the browser. You can change/add either by going to Tools=>Extensions or Tools=>Themes and clicking the "Get More" option.

I settled on the Modern Pinball theme. As for extensions, I looked over my list and found I liked the following (there aren't any links here, you can find more information on the page which pops up when you want to add extensions):

1. Adblock: Allows you to delete advertisements (or other content) that you don't want to see. It has a wildcard interface, so you can delete a large class of advertisements. For example, if http://yournews.com/advert/annoying_picture.gif is annoying, you can use wildcards to delete this picture alone, or http://yournews.com/advert/*.gif deletes any future annoying ad.
2. Sage: an RSS reader. Works in the sidebar of Firefox, and uses standard bookmarks to manage the feeds.
3. Translate and Translate Page: use Google or BabelFish translation services to convert foreign language to something like English. I keep both around as the operated a little differently and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
4. User Agent Switcher: Makes the website you're visiting think you are using IE, Opera, or whatever. Useful in avoiding some problems associated with using Firefox on clueless websites. However, it won't run Windows programs for you on a Linux machine, so some sites are still out of bounds.
5. Forecast Fox: puts local weather icons on your browser. Now it even includes a radar icon: move the cursor over it, and you can see a small regional radar picture.
6. Cookie Culler: Lets you decide to keep certain classes of cookies when you delete the rest. E.g., the cookies that tell Blogger you've already logged in.

OK, I've again gotten things set up the way I want. Except for the fonts, of course. Maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to fix that soon.