Mozilla Firefox, From Darling to Enemy in One Release

FirefoxWhat is wrong with everyone in Linux land bagging on Mozilla Firefox and their 5.0 release?

Complaints pretty much have one thing in common:  They claim there isn’t enough ‘new and shiny’ things inside FF5 to warrant a major version.  This is illogical thinking because major version means NOTHING when it comes to usability of software.  I’ve noticed that I can browse and use FF5 just as easily as I could FF4 and FF3 before it…I still type in URL’s and websites display.  My plugins all still work.  It starts up a bit faster and websites seem to load just a bit faster…which is good.  So why all the whining and complaining?

The silliest thing about this is that the same people complaining about Firefox 5 say that Chrome and IE are going to overtake it and that this is the beginning of the end for Mozilla and Firefox.  Poppycock!  Chrome and Chromium have been using Agile programming and the SAME EXACT METHODOLOGY BEHIND releases and version numbers that Firefox is doing now.  So where was the flack for Google and Chromium when they released often and incremented all the way up to version 10 and then version 12??

It is my opinion that the people shouting from the rooftops that Mozilla and Firefox are a sinking ship doomed to fail while using Chrome/Chromium in the background have no clue what Agile Programming (or in Google’s case, Agile-like programming) is or what it sets out to accomplish…and they’re showing how hypocritical they are.  If you’re one of these people, where were you when Chrome and Chromium was ratcheting up their version numbers without noticeable improvements and features?

Sad that Firefox and Mozilla, who championed one of the first fantastic browsers on Linux, has went from Linux Darling to Public Enemy Number One in a single release in some peoples eyes.  Hopefully, people will realize how silly it is and stop complaining?  Well, one can dream right?

Let’s look at the quality of the software when levelling complaints instead of being upset that the version number doesn’t jive with what we think it should.  Thus far, my experience with FF5 has been pretty darn fantastic.  Thanks go out to Mozilla…you’ve done a great iteration of software yet again.

Disillusioned by the Community

There are times when I don’t want to admit that I use and love Linux.

It’s true…at times, I’m embarrassed to tell people that I’m part of the community as a whole.

You may wonder when these times are…right now is one of those times.  I despise infighting found in free and open source software…specifically, I really don’t like it when people have one sided experiences and apply their experience to ALL areas of Linux and open source software.  Case in point is this blog post on KDE 4.6 experience in Ubuntu.  For everyone out there, please be advised that Ubuntu is not equivalent with ALL Linux.  In fact, Ubuntu does Gnome very well…but it doesn’t do KDE well at all.

If you truly want to know what KDE 4.6 is like, you need to go with a KDE specific distribution like Mandriva and ride that cutting edge.  I can guarantee you won’t be greeted by crash handlers and all sorts of nonsense that you’ll get inside Ubuntu when you install KDE along side of your Gnome install.

Posts like the one I linked to above make me angry…it’s like driving a Volvo compact car and then dismissing every other car company that makes a compact car as equivalent the experience on the Volvo.  To me, you need to drive each implementation (each companies interpretation) and make an informed decision as to what you find.  Taking a test drive of a Volvo compact and then bad mouthing all compact cars is ignorant…and in my opinion, that is what the person above does with KDE 4.x

I’m a staunch defender of KDE 4.x and I’ve blogged about ignorance surrounding it in the past.  Not all gripes about it are ignorant…but a majority of people’s problems they have with it are simply people band-wagoning together to trounce something because it’s cool to do so.  Much the same is M. Night Shyamalan’s Airbender movie…people talked so much crap about the movie and him as a director, I thought that the movie was going to be the worst movie of all time.  It wasn’t near as bad as people were making it out to be and Shyamalan isn’t the worst director out there by any means.

I think overall, KDE 4.x has become the M. Night Shyamalan of the Linux world…a very talented director(project) that everyone was accustomed to making great movies(desktops) that doesn’t want to be pigeon holed into fitting what others feel it should fit.  KDE 4 is not KDE 3 and for good reason.  It’s being coded and made into something different yet subtly similar because it’s 2011 and not 1996.  If you don’t like it, don’t use it.

IF you don’t use it…don’t trash talk it.

If you want an HONEST representation of it, go to a distribution that prides itself on providing a good implementation of it.  Saying “Ubuntu is the most popular and people are going to try it out on Ubuntu” is wrong…because I don’t know of many end users that will enable a PPA repository and possibly jack up their Gnome install to give it a go…when they can just pop in a Live CD and give it a try….I think the poster of the blog entry above forgot about the magic of Live CD’s for his ‘review’.  It’s too bad that he feels Ubuntu’s lack of attention to all things KDE are representative to KDE as a whole…and it’s too bad his attempt at ascribing this notion comes off as troll-like.

I don’t use Ubuntu at all yet you don’t see me trolling the Ubuntu boards talking about how crappy I feel it is.  If you use Linux you are a part of the Linux community as a whole.  This community encompasses all distributions and all desktop environments.  You have a responsibility therefore; if you want to see Linux succeed, be tolerant and understanding of opposing distros/desktops. Talking trash about other opposing opinions is irresponsible and juvenile.  I hope someday people take this inherent and implied cordiality to heart.  Until then, we have posts like the one above…whether inadvertently geared to bash KDE or absolutely geared to bash KDE…it nonetheless bashed it.  I hope we can grow past things like this in the future.

GNU find – A Multidimensional Tool

Beginners are mostly afraid of command prompt.  Whenever they see a command prompt, they immediately say “its very difficult”.  But it’s not true.  The Command prompt is as friendly as GUI (Graphical User Interface), provided if you use it with proper procedure.

Most people use GUI tools to search for files.  They don’t realize that they can use command line tools to search for them as well! GNU ‘find’ is such like a tool which can not only search files but can even copy, move or delete these files on the fly.

So let’s see that how ‘find’ works.

Find Your Lost Files!

Let’s start from a simple example:

Suppose you want to search for a file named ‘master.txt’ in your home directory.

Open the Terminal and issue the following command:

find . -name “master.txt”

‘find’ will immediately show the results.  If ‘find’ does not show any result, this means that the file, in our case, ‘master.txt’, does not exist.  It is not always the case that you want to find something in you home directory.  The lost/desired file may be anywhere in your computer.  Suppose you want to find a file named ‘space-01.jpg’ and you only know that its located somewhere in /usr directory. You can find it by issuing following command in Terminal:

find /usr -name “space-01.jpg”

and ‘find’ will tell you that this is located under /usr/share/backgrounds.

Using Wildcards

Maybe you want to search for a file but you don’t know its exact name?  Don’t worry!  You can still locate the file using ‘GNU find’ and wildcard will help you in this regard. Wildcards are a way of searching files when you don’t know much about your desired file.

One of the commonly used wildcard is asterisk (*).  Lets consider an example to better understand the things.

Suppose you want to search a file named ‘Jumping_Flowers’ but you only remember the ‘Jumping‘ part of the file name.  So issue the following command in Terminal:

find . -name “Jumping*”

And it will display all the files starting with the word ‘Jumping’.  You can use asterisk (*) anywhere with a file name.  For example:

find . -name “*Jumping*”

And it will display all the files which contains the word ‘Jumping’.

Here are some more examples of use of a wildcard:

find . -name “Jumping*Flowers*”
find . -name “*Jumping*Flowres.mp3”

Searching For Different File Types

Sometimes you are not looking for some specific file but you are looking for a group of files.  For example, you may be looking for all the .txt files in your home directory.  To find all the .txt files, you will give the following command in Terminal:

find . -name *.txt

In case of mp3 files, the above command will be:

find . -name *.mp3

When You Want to Search with Respect to Time

If you want to search for files by the last time they were accessed, you can use -amin flag with ‘find’.  In this case you have to put a minus (-) sign before the time.  The time here is in minutes.  In order to search for .doc files which were accessed in last 10 minutes, you will give the following command:

find . -amin -10 -name "*.doc"

Similarly, to search for .doc files which were modified in last 20 minutes, you will use -mmin option as follows:

find . -mmin -20 -name “*.doc”

Search For Files which are Eating Your Hard Disk

There may be files on your system which are not only huge in size but also located obscure places.  You may also may not know when they were last accessed.  You have to use -size option with ‘find’ to locate them.

Let’s see how we can do this:

find . -size +100M

It will list all those files which are greater than 100 Megabytes.  You can replace ‘M’ with ‘G’ (for Gigabyte) or with ‘k’ (for Kilobyte)

Copy, Move, or Delete Unwanted Files on the Fly

Copy – ‘find’ can also be used to copy or backup your files.  You can use ‘find’ to copy certain files from one location to other with one simple command.

Suppose you want copy all of your mp3 songs from your home directory to your Windows Partition.  Enter the following command in Terminal:

find . -name "*.mp3" -exec cp {} /path/to/Windows_Drive \;

And all of your mp3 files will be copied to the desired Drive/Folder.

Move – There may be situations that you quickly want to move all of your document files from your Hard Disk to your USB to keep them safe.  To move all of your documents from your home directory to your USB, you will issue the following command:

find . -name "*.doc" -exec cp {} /path/to/USB \;

Delete – Suppose there are a lot of .tmp files and you want to get rid of them at once.  Again ‘GNU find’ is at your service and does the work for you.  Issue the following in Terminal and all of the .tmp files are gone…

find . -name '*.tmp' -exec rm {} \;

Which Files are Owned by You and Which Are Not?

There may be a situation when you want to know that which files in some other directories (or even in your home directory) are owned by some other user of your computer.

Suppose there is another user named ‘blackstar’ with whom you are sharing your PC.  Now you want to know that which .doc files in Windows Directory is owned by this user ‘blackstar’.  You can do this by issuing the following command:

find /path/to/Windows_Drive -user blackstar -name “*.doc”

Just replace ‘blackstar’ with your username to search on your system.

Direct the Output of ‘find’ to a File

You can save the results of your ‘find’ command to a text file which will allow you to examine the results in detail at some later time (or to create playlist of your songs).  For this purpose a greater than (>) sign is used (referred to as “piping the command”).

Suppose you want to save the list of all the mp3 songs in your home directory to a text file (which you can later share with your friend), you can do this by:

find . -name "*.mp3" > mp3.txt

It will save the complete path to all of your mp3 songs in the file named mp3.txt.

Find, a Handy Command Line Tool

This article is basically directed towards new users of Linux which are not much familiar with command prompt. This is a small but comprehensive article about ‘GNU find’ . The man pages of ‘find’ list a huge number of options which are difficult to explain in detail in one small article. I tried to cover those option which are commonly used. Obviously, to know more about such a powerful tool , one has to visit its man pages again and again and spend a lot time with ‘find’ 🙂

ICH6 Intel Sound on Unity or Mandriva PulseAudio Fix

I had been fighting for a very long time with pulseaudio on Unity Linux 2010…it just didn’t seem to work for me.  There were problems with having to mute and unmute the external amplifier channel in alsamixer in order to get sound to work.  On some boots there was no sound and on others, sound was fine.  When I finally installed TinyMe 2010 RC last week, I disabled pulseaudio all together to get the sound working with ALSA only.

Then the worst thing that could possibly happen on my Gateway M250 happened…ALSA stopped working and there was no sound.  I started pulseaudio back up to no avail…no matter what I did, nothing worked to get sound up and running.

It was about the time I wanted to carve the sound pieces out of my laptop and throw them across the room that I decided to give everything I tried in the past one more try.

I fixed it…and I was pretty amazed that the solution was as easy as it was having spent weeks upon weeks fighting the pulseaudio issue.  I can only surmise that I made a typo in the module that I needed to blacklist.  After this arduous journey, it came down to blacklisting the modem sound card to make things work.

To do this on Mandriva and Unity Linux you’ll need to blacklist the following module:  snd_intel8x0m.  Notice the ‘m’ on the end of the standard module snd_intel8x0 for the ICH6 sound card.

You can do this by editing the following file as root in your favorite text editor:  /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-compat

Add the following line anywhere in this file:

blacklist snd_intel8x0m

After that, you can reboot to make sure the module is blacklisted.  I know there are more elegant ways to load and unload kernel modules but this is the easiest way to get the job done for new users.  Subsequent reboots resulted in still having sounds.  Thankfully, I didn’t have to rip my laptop apart in a quest to throw the sound portions.  I sure hope this helps others out!

TinyMe Linux For The Win

I was running Unity Linux 2010.2 with KDE 4.5 for around the last month.  I really like what has been done there but it seemed a bit heavy for my Gateway M250…the CPU fan was always on which told me it was always in high use.

I checked out Gnome 2.30 on Unity and found it to be delightful on my resources; however, Gnome doesn’t make me feel warm and tingly when I use it.  I find myself frustrated with its lack of configuration options…specifically, right click menu.  So I rolled my own using the base install of Unity.  That worked quite nicely but lacked much of the polish I became accustomed to when using KDE.  What I wanted and needed was a happy medium.   I found that happy place with TinyMe Linux.

TinyMe is based on Unity Linux 2010 and was previously based on PCLinuxOS.  It uses LXPanel, PCManFM and the Openbox Window Manager to handle the heavy desktop lifting.  The ISO I used was a release candidate and lacked much of the polish of the TinyMe stable release of the past.  Even though it’s a release candidate, I still found it quite stable and usable…especially since I know my way around the openbox window manager.

You can snag the TinyMe release candidate here:  http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/tinyme/

After a few adjustments of adding my favorite programs I was in business.

TinyMe RC 2010

Even without some of the programs that made TinyMe famous (like the TinyCC) this distro is both stable and robust which is a testament to the underlying Unity Linux core.  If this release candidate is any indication, look for GREAT things to come from TinyMe 2010’s full release…something I will be looking forward to!

Midori, Flash, and Unity Linux 2010

I just took a look at how Unity Linux 2010.1 shapes up and found that the flashplayer plugin doesn’t work with the default browser which is Midori.  Here’s a quick fix for getting flash to work with Midori on Unity 2010.  First, install the flash-player-plugin (as root in terminal or use the gui):

smart install flash-player-plugin

Next, we need to create a directory under your profile to house the flashplayer plugin and then copy it there.  I’m sure we might be able to get by with a symbolic link but I didn’t try that out…

mkdir -p ~/.mozilla/plugins && cp /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/

That’s it, it should work now.  I’ve done this on 32bit Unity Linux 2010.1 on a Gateway M250.  Hopefully this helps out someone out there 🙂

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