Posts Tagged ‘Mozilla’

Installing Flash Player 9 Final

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

The first non-beta version of Flash 9 for Linux is out, you can download the installer from Adobe’s site. I downloaded the tar.gz installer and had no problem whatsoever installing it. The instructions are on the download page, and all you’ll need to know before hand is where your browsers are installed to. To find out, you can use the package management tools included in your distro.

Fedora:

rpm -ql firefox

This query will give you a lot of information (you might want to pipe it to less). What you want to zero in on is the directory that is referenced most, on my system it’s /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.9/. You’ll notice a lot of references to /usr/share/ and can pretty much ignore them. That directory holds icons, .desktop files and other shared objects.

I did the same for SeaMonkey (rpm -ql seamonkey), the install location for the current version of the monkey is /usr/lib/seamonkey-1.0.7/.

Ubuntu:

dpkg -L firefox

That’s another command that will hand you TONS of information. Again, I only care about the installation directory, I know from using Ubuntu that the standard application install location is /usr/lib/[installdir]. So to clean up the output, I used grep to filter out the data I don’t need (you could do the same on the Fedora example above).

dpkg -L firefox |grep /usr/lib

That gave me something that looked like:

/usr/lib
/usr/lib/firefox
/usr/lib/firefox/firefox
/usr/lib/firefox/libgfxpsshar.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libgkgfx.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libgtkembedmoz.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libgtkxtbin.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libjsj.so
[snip]

From that I can see that Ubuntu installs Firefox to /usr/lib/firefox.

I also use SeaMonkey on Ubuntu, but I had to manually install it. For that reason, dpkg has no clue as to where the software is. I chose to install it to /usr/local/seamonkey, which is the location that the SeaMonkey installer suggests. I just keep that in the back of my mind or I could enter a locate seamonkey. That will return a lot of hits as well and will look something like:

/usr/bin/seamonkey
/usr/local/seamonkey
/usr/local/seamonkey/install.log
/usr/local/seamonkey/registry
/usr/local/seamonkey/libplds4.so
/usr/local/seamonkey/libxpcom.so
/usr/local/seamonkey/libmozz.so
[snip]

Now that I know where my browsers are installed to, I can run the Flash installer and give it the correct path to each browser when asked.

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WFTL-LUG and a Gmail POP Trick

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

OK, this IS Linux related, in the way that you can run Thunderbird on Linux. I just thought this was pretty cool and I had a need for it. I recently joined the WFTL-LUG (how many times I type WTFL by the end of this who can even guess), which is a global Linux Users Group. While I have a real, physical LUG in my area, I’ve found the topics to be a little too technical for the beginner (to my dismay). Since I want to hear about the experiences of others and maybe even offer some tidbits of advice myself, I want to be involved in something with a good amount of Linux chatter. If something like this interests you, check out the link above. Not only is the LUG hella useful, but the site itself (http://www.marcelgagne.com) has a lot of great information. Thanks go to Jon Watson for directing me to the LUG.

What I wanted was a second (or third) gmail account that I could use just for the WFTL-LUG, and I wanted to be able to manage it in Thunderbird from two locations; work and home. Since there’s no IMAP for gmail, and I’m personally not ready to run an IMAP server on my own, I decided to enable POP on the account, grab the mail, and store it locally. This was a great idea until I remembered that once the email was downloaded into one mail client, the second client wouldn’t see those messages and they wouldn’t be downloaded. Well, this wasn’t going to work, I would either have to use one client, or worry about having some mail in one location and some in another. I can’t be the only one that has this problem. I googled for a solution and came up with “recent mode”. It works like this; you change the username (I did it on both mail clients, but one should have been enough) to recent:username@gmail.com. This retrieves all messages received in the last thirty days whether it’s been collected by another POP client or not. The exact wording for it is here.

Now I only need to worry about marking messages/threads read when I get home. Just thought I’d share as it saved me a headache :)

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DD-WRT: My Router Runs Linux

Sunday, January 7th, 2007

Installing DD-WRT on the Linksys WRT54GL went pretty much as the installation instructions said it would. I made it a point to follow them EXACTLY. Before getting started, I reviewed a lot of the info on the wiki pertaining to my particular router model as well as others.

Firstly, I powered up the router and performed a hard reset (hold the reset button down for 30 seconds). This just ensures that the router is using its factory default configuration. I then unplugged my Ubuntu Edgy machine from the old router and connected it to the WRT54GL. I reconfigured my network interface from a static address to DHCP and renewed my IP. I did this from the command line so it looked like sudo ifdown eth0 ; sudo ifup eth0.

The firmware installation is done from the router’s web based administration panel, so using Firefox 2.0.0.1 I logged in and navigated to the firmware upload administration tab. I used the browse button to locate dd-wrt.v23_generic.bin (which I had downloaded and extracted when I ordered the router) and clicked upgrade. After a few moments, I received a page telling me that the upload was successful and I walked away from the whole project for 5 minutes (as the wiki instructed me to. I wanted a beer anyway).

Time passes…

Back at the keyboard now, I click the Continue button and I’m presented with a white page and some fields asking for my username and password. I close Firefox, perform another hard reset of the router, open Firefox again and enter the address of router. Just like magic, I’m presented with the DD-WRT configuration pages of the router. Success!

Since it’s late and I just want to get things working, I’m only doing the basics, setting up static DHCP and a new wireless SSID.

Step one, change the default password from “admin” to something much, much better. Next, I collect all of the MAC addresses from the machines on my network and make my way to the Administration/Services tab. There, I assigned the MAC addresses to host names/IP addresses and configured my LAN domain name (just something I like to play with). I started testing DCHP by connecting to each of the Linux machines, changing them from a static to a DHCP configuration and renewing the IP address (same commands as above). Flawless! With the Linux machines done I configure the rest of the machines on the network the same way.

Next, I create a new wireless SSID and configure my two wireless machines to associate with it. This is where I had a little trouble. Everything but the Ubuntu install on the laptop connected without issue. For whatever reason I just can’t get the bcm4306 based wireless card to associate with the router using manually configured NDISwrapper. I’ll revisit this when I’m not so tired :)

Update: I think I have this fixed, I’ll tell you how in another post

I know I said I was only doing the basics, but I had to try SSH. So back to the Services tab, I enable SSH management (and disable Telnet as I’ll never use it) and click the Reboot Router button. Next, I open a terminal session and enter ssh dd-wrt. I log in with my user/pass and I’m at an ASH shell prompt. The output from a uname -r reads like Linux DDWRT 2.4.34-pre2 #170 Fri Sep 15 20:10:21 CEST 2006 mips unknown. Pretty sexy :)

All in all it was a satisfying experience. I’m running Linux on my router and there’s a LOT of cool things I can do. I haven’t scratched the surface yet, I’ll be exploring options for a while and when I come across something sweet I’ll post about it here. If you’re at all interested in exploring DD-WRT, start by checking out the compatibility list and reading up on the features. The wiki is a great place to start. I had no trouble ordering a 100% compatible router for around $55.00 US (there was a rebate).

If you’re new to Linux and don’t want to have to manage your router from a command shell, no worries. The web configuration pages are extremely useful and cover the full configuration of the router in a point and click fashion. You just can’t go wrong :)

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