Darned plugins – How to run a separate copy of Firefox

I recently created a wordpress website, www.leylandlandscapes.co.uk, and I tried free hosting.

This was the first free host trying to find a free host, and it is fraught with obstacles. The third one I tried, host-ed, was the first that actually worked. Of course I wanted everything, but the resources provided were suitable: a MySql database, PHP, a decent amount of web space. I can now understand why free hosting isn’t as free as you think.

Where are my pictures?
My biggest problem was that the pictures were missing.

My first measure of how good an online service is, is the response when you ask them a question. Do they answer? When do they answer? Does it help? They did, and it did.

The problem turned out to be my slightly paranoid firefox plugins. I have Adblock, and Noscript. Plus the Dansguardian content filtering at home. I needed a simple way to run firefox briefly without the plugins. My answer, being a linux user, was create another user, and run firefox under that account.

These are my steps for running a pristine firefox
I have seen other ways of running firefox with new profiles. But this seems cleaner to me, keeping everything separated as a new user. YMMV.

• Create a new user (try using useradd), say chewy. root user needs to do this.
• run the command
  

  xhost +local:

  This will allow any local user to use your X display.

• Log in as new user. E.g.
  

  login chewy

• Make sure firefox knows where the X display is, and run firefox.
  

  export DISPLAY=:0.0
  firefox

Updating Ipod Touch to v3.0 under linux

While I would love to tell you that this is possible without using a virtual machine, as far as I know at the time of writing, it isn’t.

However, I use VirtualBox to run XP Home, and I have successfully updated my ipod touch running iTunes from within the virtual machine.

There were 2 problems I encountered, when updating a 2nd generation Touch, and an iPhone:

• USB problems with Touch – it seems to hang and never come back. My problem is that when the Touch is in recovery mode, the USB identity of the Touch changes, so you will need to enable the Touch in recovery mode. So dont run the VirtualBox in full screen mode, then you can use the USB icon on the status bar at the bottom to enable the Touch.
• iPhone gives error 23 – despite the Touch having no network problems at all, the iPhone had problems that were more difficult to solve. It wouldn’t download the firmware. It was eventualy tracked down to something on my own network. When the update used a tethered mobile for internet access, the download happened OK, so I am guessing VirtualBox is capable of updating iPhones too.

Linux bluetooth audio: using alsa and a2dp

I got a pair of bluetooth headphones for Christmas, and they have made listening to music so much easier. The model is Zoom 4380. I used them with my phone, and the absence of wires from the phone (and the little drop-down speaker stalk) makes calling cool too.

The only problem I have atm is resuming music from the headphones, once it has stopped.

Anyway, the purpose of this thing here is using these headphones with Gentoo. In the end, the setup seemed easy. The journey wasn’t…
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c902 and linux

A little while ago, I received a shiny new c902, and looked forward to loading it with mp3s…

I plugged it in, selected anything, but no joy. Hunting for a while led me to libmtp. I tried ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, and managed to download photos, but still no music.

Let me cut to the chase – I found that libmtp 0.3.5 and gphotofs do the business. I can see the phone storage, and the memory card. Normal operations work fine; I have filed up my memory card now.

Find gphotofs here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gphoto/files/.

Mackeral sky

Unusual for me, but I quite liked this cloud effect.

HD DVD steps with linux: read the disk, stupid

I recently bought a Acer 5920 to replace my old Dell 510. I went for a machine with more clout this time, since I sometimes use it for work. It came with Vista Home Premium, but I installed Gentoo on the spare partition, and spend most of my time there. They co-exist without problems.

One of the features of the laptop is a HD-DVD drive. I don’t have any HD-DVDs, so I never used it until I was lent one. Vista, I thought, was the obvious choice. Pre-installed, Vista has a player, so I started it up, and it played the movie (although it wouldn’t play it on the TV via s-video – incompatible video device).

I returned to the movie to finish watching it. Restarted Vista. It wouldn’t boot. I got a blue screen, and was re-directed to a system repair menu. It didn’t work; so I have an outstanding service request with Acer.

What about linux? I started googling, my suspicion that HD-DVD under linux might be – “less mature” – was correct. People have watched HD-DVDs under linux; just not very easily. I fell at the first hurdle. I needed udf version 2.50; but my kernel, 2.6.25, didn’t have it; I have to patch the kernel.

A patched kernel is building as I type, although I needed to get 2.6.25.5 (from the european mirror). The udf patch was a little more difficult to track down.

More details and progress reports later.

Useful links:
the udf patches
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/BluRayAndHDDVD

Morna

Bedlington street.

Our street is unusual for it’s population. Not of people, but Bedlington Terriers, a little enclave of 8.

Turning to Gentoo

I like Slackware. When I was a total newbie, someone suggested SUSE, but after a little while, when I wanted to know what was going on ‘under the hood’, it got complicated. Back then, Yast was ok, probably not as comprehensive as today. I tried Slackware, and liked its simplicity, and clean-ness. It didn’t provide lots of packages installed by default, that I had little idea of. Quite often the packages I did want weren’t provided as Slackware packages at all. But that was OK – this more ‘zen’ Linux made under the hood a way of life. What is the sound of one automounter daemon clapping?

The cost of Slackware was – you needed to know how things worked. If you must have fancy removable drive recognition, start reading those fine manuals. For servers, Slackware with it’s minimal approach, and intelligent audience, the match is close to perfect.

But eventually, where I was, living on the desktop, configuring video drivers, other niceties (plus cool toys, spinning cubes) called out. I turned to Gentoo.

It was partly the building from source that I was familiar with, the speed, the flexibility that got my attention. And a civilized package management system. I am happy with it, that I still have text files to configure, with the breadth of packages offered, and depth of the community.

And the last word with Linux is, of course, the choice is yours.

encfs and automount

I started using automount to mount devices, and drives on the fly. I works nicely, and almost effortlessly, once you get the hang of configuring it. No more typig mount etc. etc. had me sold. This is with Gentoo.

But when I wanted to manage a secure area on my laptop, so it mounted when I wanted, and tidied up a short while after I finished, I had a few problems.

I had to hack mount.fuse, so it took notice of a new flag: `ignore_options’. I think basically somethin’s broke.

The hacked mount.fuse is here.

And you’ll want an example line for using encfs in the automount config file, called something like auto.auto:

secure -fstype=fuse,ignore_options encfs#--public --extpass=/etc/autofs/askpass /mnt/.secure.encfs


Perlpod update

I have been using a perl script I got here to get my BBC podcasts, and Java Posse broadcasts. Until recently, that is…

Anyway, I hacked the script, to remove carriage returns out, so the url in the enclosure (that’s the mp3) is again being fetched. Find it perlpod here. md5sum for the file is: