I finally moved the hardware of my home-server into a new case and upgraded my seriously outdated Ubuntu to Hardy Heron. Since I wanted to try encrypting my hard disk for a while now and I will be doing it for my notebook as well, I gave it a shot and it worked quite well. Here is how it’s done…

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A few days ago, I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron on my company notebook. One of the many new features is the default installation of Firefox 3 Beta 5 which too has many new features. But running a Firefox beta constitutes a big problem: Most of the add-ons I installed in my old Firefox 2 after hours of reviewing are not installable any longer. Mozillas add-on website will disable the install link for many add-ons and state that “This add-on is for older versions of Firefox”. Even if one logs in to the add-ons website and clicks the “Ignore version check” link, Firefox will refuse to install this update.

IMHO running Firefox without any add-ons is very painful. So I was looking for a way to install the add-ons anyway and as it happens, there is a way.

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I only recently learned of the existence of the Synergy project. The project could be described as a software KVM switch, although it doesn’t switch video. It does however connect any number of PCs to one server allowing to control all connected clients with the one keyboard and mouse connected to the server.

One can just move the mouse from one desktop to another and the keyboard works on whatever desktop the mouse is on. Furthermore, Synergy joins the clipboards of all attached clients so one can copy something into the clipboard on one PC and paste it on another. This is so cool!

According to the Synergy website, one can mix Linux, Windows and MacOS clients. Since I have neighter of the latter two, I only could test it with two Ubuntu 7.10 and an Ubuntu 7.04 machine. It worked perfectly. Total time to setup following the manual: 5 minutes.

Nine weeks ago, I switched from Opera to Firefox. I said in the previous post, that I would report back on the results, so here it goes.

As I expected, it took some getting used to, but I’m fairly comfortable with my new browser now. I love the Tree Style Tab add-on which allows me to have even more tabs open because it can collapse trees of tabs and the Speed Dial add-on which helps me to organize all the websites I use on a daily basis. (I also had enough time to realized that Firefox differentiates between “plugins” and “add-ons”. I’m talking about the latter here.) Read the rest of this entry »

After discovering, that the shortcuts CTRL+W and ALT+D delete words backwards/forwards in bash just the same way as they do in vim or emacs, I went searching for more shortcuts and eventually found this list. I especially like ALT+. and ALT+T which allow moving around parameters very nicely.

If you’re running Ubuntu, like I do, your bash will most likely run within a Gnome Terminal. And as one might expect, this brings another set of shortcuts to the game. The best list of all the shortcuts I could find is this list of keys of the Gconf database. Together with the bash shortcuts, this really makes working with the shell very comfortable and keyboard junkies like me very happy.

While searching for the lists mentioned above, I also learned how to specify up to 12 additional shortcuts. Very nice, I think, since the shortcuts accessible through System -> Preferences -> Keyboard shortcuts are clearly too few. Just start the gconf-editor and set a key combo in:

/apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 (through 12)

while specifying the commands in:

/apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 (through 12)

My new cell phone arrived earlier this week. YEAH! :-) The difference is gigantic because my old phone was a 7 years old Nokia 8910. The new one is a Nokia E65 which has all the gimmicks a cell phone apparently needs nowadays. Most important for me was, that it is a “business phone”, which AFAICS means that it has a full-fledged address book and calender and some additional programs to display MS Office files. I’m far from having explored all the possibilities of my new toy, but by far the most important thing for me was getting synchronization working with my Ubuntu desktop. So I did!

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In my opinion, Opera was the leveling rule for web browsers for a long time. And while others praised Firefox and its many plugins, I kept using Opera, certain I did not need plugins because Opera already supported everything I needed. Tabs, fully customizable UI, mouse gestures, full usability without a mouse, a truly revolutionary mail client, the simple fact, that it was very much faster than Firefox and many more small but helpful features.

Not anymore. Over the last year, things accumulated which annoyed me more and more. The fact that I never could get the video plugins to work properly. Or that there is no way to integrate del.icio.us bookmarks other than a little custom button. Or the lack of an encryption plugin for M2, let alone synchronization with a mobile phone. Opera does a very good job at what it does, but it can’t beat specialized programs. And I want plugins! The day Opera will go open source and gets a plugin API, I’ll be back. But for now, I’ll give Firefox a try.

Of course it’s not as simple as just installing Firefox. I have very specific requirements to the look and feel and to the functions of my web browser — I spend hours customizing Opera. And over the years I grew accustom to all the little details of Opera which make browsing so comfortable. So, could Firefox be customized to resemble my Opera? Well, let’s see…

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CDex ist ein OpenSource-Programm für Windows, was für die meisten Nutzer hauptsächlich bedeutet, dass es kostenlos und frei verfügbar ist. Es kann hier heruntergelanden werden. Man sollte die Version 1.70 nehmen, die zwar noch nicht vollständig fertig gestellt ist, aber sehrwohl stabil genug läuft. Möchte man CDex in einer anderen Sprache als Englisch benutzen, muss man außerdem die jeweilige Sprachdatei auf der selben Seite herunterladen. Die Sprachdateien für Deutsch, Spanisch und Italienisch sind jedoch schon dabei und müssen nicht extra heruntergeladen werden.

Die Installation ist genauso einfach wie bei jedem anderen Windows-Programm auch. Einfach die heruntergeladene Datei doppelt anklicken und ein paar mal auf “Next” klicken. Wer will, kann den Installations-Pfad noch anpassen. Die Frage, ob man die README-Datei lesen möchte, dürfte für die meisten Benutzer mit “Nein” zu beantworten sein. Nun lässt sich CDex wie gewohnt über das Icon auf dem Desktop oder über das Startmenü starten.

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Finally, I got it to work. Both memory modules where broken - took me some time to figure it out. But since I had help it’s working now. I think. At least it is running now for almost 6 hours without a crash :)

It’s a Lenovo ThinkPad R60 with an Intel Centrino Core Duo 1.83 GHz, 1 Gig of RAM and an ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 which makes it about three times faster than my current desktop computer, which served me well for the last 7 years. Now, all that’s left to do is to setup a perfect Ubuntu and I can switch…

Yet again, I’ve rearranged my blog. Yet again, I really want to start posting more regular. We’ll see how this works in a few weeks, I guess.

Thanks to Arcsin for this very nice wordpress template. (I’ve changed the header image though.)