Firefox slowness on Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10

I've been experiencing a very annoying slow browsing experience on my Firefox but I've found a fix for it. Type about:config in the address bar and hit enter.

from there you should see a list of configuration lines. Look for the following:

- network.dns.disableIPV6 

- network.http.pipelining

- network.http.proxy.pipelining

on all of these click with the right button and toggle them from false to true. Lastly look for

-network.http.proxy.pipelining.maxrequests

change this one from whatever is there (2 in my case) to 8

I hope this helps.

FTP client in Ubuntu

Just started to work on my website using my Linux distro. First I needed an HTML editor which I believe I already posted about. Anyway, I'm using Komposer for that purpose, and then I needed an FTP client, since unfortunately Nautilus doesn't work with FTP the same way Windows Explorer does. That was a disappointment, as I do love how on Windows I can just type in my ftp adress and boom, I'm pretty much there.

Well there are a few options I found, such as Gftp, Kasablanca, Fireftp, KFTPgrabber, and others. I ended up chosing Filezilla, since I had already heard about it before and figured that should be a good one to start with.

The app is pretty good, I have just used it a couple of times and it seemed stable enough and powerful enough for my needs. To get the bastard, you can go through the software center or the good old command line

$sudo apt-get install filezilla

easy enough

Editing PDF files and looking at the stars

Just today I had to send out a PDF document that I've received a few days ago, however in this document I had about 12 pages of irrelevant information I didn't want to share. Well there I went to look for a nice app to just remove pages off of a PDF file, and that's when I came by this neat little app on the Ubuntu Software Center called PDF Shuffler. It is a very simple and very small app that just did exactly what I needed, it literally took me less than 5 minutes to search a program like this on UBC, check a couple of reviews, download and install it. It works very well.

As I was in the Software Center, I decided to download this other program called Stellarium, which is an Astronomy app. It is great if you are interested in finding out what star you are looking at night. It's neat that you can also look at the sky anywhere in the world, and it will give you names of stars, planets and constellations. I recommend.

KompoZer, free HTML editor for Linux.

I've been using Dreamweaver as my HTML editor for as long as I can remember. I am pretty sure that before that I used notepad, but that was easily over 13 years ago. Well today I decided to look for a new editor that doesn't crash on me as much and that works on my Ubuntu distro. After doing some reading I decided to go with KompoZer, which is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) type editor, which to me just saves me a ton of time; and it seems quite popular in the community.

To get this beast you can either go the synaptic route or the console route, which will require you to type:

$ sudo apt-get install kompozer

I'll update this post once I have used the program a few times to let you guys know how I like it.

Easiest printer install EVER !!! & update on my media manager choice

I had been using my printer only on Windows before, just because it was already installed and I figured why bother. Well today I booted my machine on Linux and by mistake I had left my printer on last time I used it. So once I logged into Ubuntu something prompted asking me for root rights and I read that it was my HP printer asking to be installed. Well, I figured there would be no harm in typing my password so I did. The process took a solid 3 minutes and I just had to type a "proceed" type command when prompted and voilà. My HP LaserJet 1020 printer was ready to print, I did a print test and it worked. I have to say I'm very impressed with this aspect of my Ubuntu 11.10, that was by far the simplest printer installation I have ever seen.

On a different note, I have tried Rhythmbox Music Player as an alternative to my recent move to Banshee. My first impression is that Rhythmbox is a bit of a plain thing to look at, however, the functionality is a different story. This wonderfully light media manager has been working wonders for me. I now have all my podcasts being subscribed properly on it, and transferring them to my ipod is no longer an issue. Not only that, but my podcasts are now going to their appropriate menus, just like I had on my iTunes. The syncing is very similar to Banshee, where you kind of drag and drop. I think I still prefer iTunes in that respect, but being able to manage my music on Linux and do virtually everything just as well without relying on proprietary iTunes is great. Therefore, I would certainly recommend Rhythmbox to anyone interested in the switch.

Banshee and MediaTomb rant

My PC just recently blew up and I was forced to shell out some money to buy myself a new machine. Anyway, I am taking this unfortunate event to push my reliance on Windows aside as much as possible, what better opportunity to just not install the programs I am used to in order to try cross-plataform applications on my new Linux install.

On my new machine I installed Ubuntu 11.11 Oneiric Ocelot, which from reviews seemed very good and made users happier than the Natty Narwhal release. Well firstly I have to say the aesthetic side of the new release is a nice change. The new menu is certainly better looking, the login screen is OK but I can't say I like it more than what it was in 11.04.

Well there have been 2 things so far that I've been trying to accomplish on Ubuntu that haven't been the most pleasant experiences. First I have been attempting to use Banshee to replace the bulky iTunes that I have been using for many years. I had moved to iTunes initially for the same reason most people did, which was for using our iPods more efficiently. I had a hard time going from something lightweight like Winamp to iTunes. Banshee actually has some very nice features, such as the way it is integrated to the OS which is very nice, the memory usage is another advantage and the fact that it seems to pick up album covers very efficiently is another reason for liking it.

Unfortunately so far my experience hasn't been 100% positive. One of my main needs for a media manager is for managing my iPod. I use my iPod very heavily during the week. I like music and especially enjoy podcasts and audiobooks. iTunes manual sync interface has done all this amazingly well for the last 4 years or so, but I still wanted to move away from it if there was a better open source option available. I way rather not support Apple and other proprietary applications if I have the option.

My first issue with Banshee has been the aparent inability to upload my podcasts to my iPod as podcasts. By that I mean that when you load a podcast to my iPod it doesn't show up under my "podcasts" section. I can get used to not being able to synch my files with a checkbox, but not having a "podcasts" folder is a bit annoying. Perhaps this is a problem with the hardware so that users can't get all the functionality without iTunes, idk. My next problem is that now that I have moved podcast files to my ipod it doesn't seem able to play it. I found them on the player but when I try to play it, it just stays at 0:00 and nothing comes out. I'm going to try a bit more and see if there are ways around these annoyances. If not I'll try a different open source option if it seems to do what I need.

Lastly, I have been trying to share media over my network to my PS3 through Linux. So far I've been using MediaTomb which seems kind of buggy most of the time. I can never tell if things are going to show up on my PS3 and often they show up and don't play. I can't claim that Windows Vista and XP were bug free at first, so I will keep trying with MediaTomb and if that fails I am sure there are other options out there.

I would love to use Windows solely for gaming and the occasional Excel spreadsheet functionality I don't get on LibreOffice. Unfortunately LibreCalc just won't cut it for my spreadsheet needs. I am trying to cut my ties to Windows wherever I can.

Wow, this post probably makes Linux sounds like a bad move. Don't get the wrong impression, these are just a few challenges I've had. I still love the two distros I've tested so far.

Just to even out my post, let me say that windows 7 gave me a blue screen on my 3rd boot after I got my new system. Not only that but I'm not the biggest fan of the Windows 7 task bar. I absolutely hate that I can't easily pin files directly in there. Either it takes 2 extra clicks to achieve the same action now or you have to trick windows with a pseudo-application. Considering the changes are supposed to be an improvement on the interface I would call that a big failure. Not only that but I almost feel like there is less room for customization as well. I still haven't found my loved "desktop" button either on my task-bar which is probably the one I use the most in previous versions of Windows. Sure, I'm sure you can still do it, and I'm sure there is another shortcut available, but I don't want to waste my time learning about an OS I already mastered a decade ago.

I then went to try to disable auto-play on Win7 for when you insert media like a USB drive. Well, not only its extremely difficult to figure out how to do it, but I ended up having to download some random script to do it for me. Microsoft is definitely disappointing me big time with this new version of Windows.

Lastly, what's up with not being able to make my desktop icons smaller. The small size is not small at all. I'm not blind or old, so don't give me that crap.



 edit 1: I have found a way around the missing podcast directory on my ipod, which apparently shows up as a playlist called "podcasts", so that's not too bad. I have also found that some of my podcasts are working on my ipod but not all of them yet. I'm still having a lot of problems with Banshee, it seems buggy and it crashes a lot. I have yet to see any other software on my ubuntu that keeps crashing and Banshee seems to crash about every other time I use. I have done some reading, and found out this may be due to my large library size, the application is still a bit buggy for the moment.
 edit 2: My frustrations with Banshee are leading me to try some other options, my next one will be Rhythmbox which I have heard good things about, we'll see how it does. If this one is also another application that doesn't work for me I will attempt Songbird, which does also look very interesting from what I've seen.

Sharing media on Ubuntu (to PS3 and probably Wii and XBox as well)

Last week my PC blew up, this ended up a big excuse for me to attempt to change most of my computing to Linux. Anyone that has switched to Linux knows that it needs to be a gradual process, unfortunately I had to spend C$100 on a Windows 7 license because I still need it. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but paying for my OS actually hurts me. Anyway, today I want to share some of my videos and music on my network, the idea is to play my files on my PS3 and I'm wondering how to do that outside of Windows (which was not all that great via Windows Vista anyway).

I started by downloading an app from the repositories called Mediatomb which you can also get via the terminal by typing:

$ sudo apt-get install mediatomb

First thing you have to do is enable sharing to your system, which in my case is a PS3. This is done via the command:

$ sudo gedit ~/.mediatomb/config.xml

There you will want to find a line with:

<protocolInfo extend="no"/>

...now change that "no" to a "yes"... now look for a line saying

<mappings> <extension-mimetype ignore-unknown="no">

and add these two lines into the section below it, there will be a suggestion to just uncomment it but you can just add them:

<map from="avi" to="video/x-divx"/>

<map from="divx" to="video/x-divx"/>

Then you actually need to run it from the terminal by typing:

$ sudo mediatomb

This should give you an ip address with a port number (like http://192.168.1.101:49155/), so copy this and access it through your browser. Now you can navigate through your files and folders (filessystem), and anything you would like to share with your PS3, simply click on the + sign. Once you have done that to all the files you want to share you may go back to the "database" option and see what you are sharing over you LAN.

For some reason I get 2 options for Mediatomb on my PS3, and the second one tends to have a "Directories" folder that I can access and use my media. I hope this helps.