Do you think I was going to wait for Red Hat to package the official Fedora version of Firefox 2.0?

Aside from Mozilla being silly about names, I absolutely adore this browser. What’s more, only a few of my extensions weren’t compatible and I’m sure they’ll be updated very quickly.

And it’s so much faster than 1.5.0.x too, and aside from still having ugly buttons in forms on Linux (and the Mac as well), it’s beautiful.

W00t! I love this browser! OK, fine, I’ll try and return to sanity, I know, it’s only a browser, but it’s an app I’m going to be staring at for a long time until Firefox 3.0…

Any Fedora fans better take note – FC6 has now officially been released.

I’ll download it in a day or two, but you can grab it right now from the Fedora Project page.

Just a very very quick post to let people know that Flash Player 9 for Linux beta is out. W00t!

See the post at Penguin.SWF or just download it now.

Or read my initial response to the news. Heh.

You may well have recently read my glee at getting a decent screen recording solution for Linux running and working, and this tutorial on how to get it to work for you has been brewing for a while now.

However, this solution is not just for Linux. It’s actually cross-platform and works across the big three main operating systems and should work on other Unix systems with little changes. Don’t worry, the Windows tutorial is coming up soon!

(Quick note – there are a couple of issues that I haven’t ironed out yet in this tutorial, but I wanted to get it out on my site sooner rather than later. They don’t affect installation, but I can’t seem to get recording in Ubuntu yet. It’s still worth running through the install, however, and rest assured I am working on the problems and will get them fixed as soon as I can!) All fixed!

This is also the first tutorial to be brought to you courtesy of my fresh new Ubuntu installation, just for doing tutorials (so I don’t have to uninstall and reinstall everything from my main machine where it’s working nicely, and of course for Ubuntu specific stuff).

OK, let’s go!

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Finally found a decent video screen capture solution for Linux (well, actually it’s cross-platform but that’s even better). It’s called pyvnc2swf and hopefully it will allow me to augment my future tutorials with video and audio.

So to test it out, here is a quick demo of killing processes, tying in with my recent tutorial on the subject.

Don’t worry, I’ll reveal all on how to set up pyvnc2swf with audio and all that stuff in due course.

Watch it here.

(While I can get KDE running in my recording VNC system by running killall twm;startkde, I can’t seem to find the command for Gnome, and it would be great to offer cross-desktop screen demos. Someone tell me how! Please…)

Just had a very quick play with Firefox 2.0 RC2.

The new icon theme is nice and there are various enhancements to the feed functionality and UI and stuff.

But by far, the best thing about FF 2.0 I’ve seen so far is that it is fast

On an AMD Sempron 2600+ (this is not my main system, a P4 3.0 GHz) it goes from nought to loaded up and ready to go in 1.05 seconds. Compare that to 1.5.0.4 (yes, it’s old because it’s a SLED 10 system and I don’t have any updates on it) which hobbles along and gets there in 2.88 seconds.

I’m officially fired up about Firefox 2.0 now – the only bad thing will be waiting for extensions to get compatibility (though I might resort to tweaking the install.js files if necessary).

(Why am I so fired up about less than 3 seconds? Because it really does make a difference to have your app instantly respond to you.) I’ll have the same for Thunderbird, please (TB 1.5.0.7 is not very quick to start up either).

I like it!

Disclaimer: my timing is in no way scientific, I just used a stopwatch, so they’re probably really inaccurate. But you get the gist, it’s fast and if you still don’t believe me, download it and test it against the latest 1.5.0.x build.

It’s time for another quick Beginner’s Linux!

I’d love to say it doesn’t happen on Linux, but very rarely it does. I can say it happens less often than on Windows, though. What am I talking about? Programs and processes misbehaving – locking up, stopping working and generally causing a problem.

The problem on Windows is that if this happens, there’s no sure fire way to just nuke the offending app from your running processes. Yes, you can use Task Manager and close the process, but if that doesn’t work, well… (bad memories here).

On Linux, if this situation does occur, you have a couple of wonderful programs called kill and killall that are invaluable for killing things when they go wrong (saves many a restart of the whole system).

This is going to be quite a quick tutorial, partly because the subject matter doesn’t take that much time to cover and partly because I’m starting to get quite a lot of work I have to do, which means I’m going have to be a bit brief. Anyway, onto the tutorial…

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Recently Debian Linux project have come under fire from Mozilla (the parent organisation of Firefox and Thunderbird) about using the ‘Firefox’ name in Debian.

Basically, the Debian Free Software Guidelines state that Debian can’t use the Firefox logo (as it’s not under the same licence as the Firefox code and the licence isn’t considered Free). So for some time, Debian (and derivatives, such as Ubuntu) have been using Firefox with a custom icon and calling it ‘Firefox’, not ‘Mozilla Firefox’.

Apparently, this isn’t acceptable any more and Mozilla want to either see and approve all the changes Debian make to Firefox, or see that Debian and derivatives stop using the Firefox name.

I think this is ridiculous. How can this be helping free and open source software if we have squabbles amongst the different communities?! If Firefox is removed from Debian/Ubuntu/MEPIS/all the others, then it’s not exactly going to be easy to convince potential Windows switchers that Linux is better if they can’t use Firefox on it (that they might use on Windows already)!

Please, drop it, Mozilla and let them keep using the name. If that can’t happen, then Debian and Ubuntu should just rename it ‘Web Browser’ or something like that. In my opinion, having Firefox in Linux (remembering Ubuntu is the most popular distro) is very important.

Of course, if it does get removed, there’s nothing stopping people from downloading vanilla Firefox from the Mozilla site, but that would be a pain. Firefox, in my opinion, needs to be built in to the OS. Firefox is usually the experience the average user will have had with ‘open source’, so keeping that consistency is vital.

Please don’t do this, Mozilla (not that it would affect me personally, being a Fedora user)…

Couple of other links on this topic:

Chris Van Patten has got a simplified ‘conversation’ version of the story and Jacob Peddicord was involved in the discussion and has a more detailed look.

It’s back! Well, it’s about time for Part 3 of my file permissions tutorial. Just before we get stuck in to the gory details of the content of this tutorial, it’s worth mentioning that it’s a good idea to read up on Part 1 and Part 2 before trying this, especially if you know nothing about file permissions on Linux.

Right, let’s get started!

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Hello again! This is Part 2 of my tutorial on understanding file permissions on Linux. If you haven’t already and don’t have much of an understanding of Linux file permissions, try reading Part 1. If you’ve got an understanding, but don’t know how to change them, you could start here!

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