Monthly Archive for November, 2006

Rethink the preloader

In the last 6 weeks I’ve got >1500 visitors to my homepage by google while they were searching for sth. similar to “firefox 2.0 preloader”. They all read my article about how to disable the Session-Restorer, so that there won’t be any annoying dialogs asking for restarting the last session after each System Shutdown. Since that I’m already switch 100% to Ubunu Linux, so I can’t use the preloader anymore, which is by myself very sad, because I have to wait longer for a new Firefox-Window even if switch to a faster CPU(P4 Celeron 2,2 -> Core 2 Duo T7600). My first idea was to pack it with UPX, but that would still be a hack like my way to disable the annoying Session-Restore-dialogue. So I thought about writing a new Preloader which should work on all Firefox compatibe OS. My favorite was to start Firefox with the command “firefox -preload”, ut figuring out, where to add new commandline arguments was nearly impossible, so that need help by some better XULRunner/Firefox-Developers(as long as I have to wait for the help, I’m using MinimizeToTray, but it’s not really that what I want).

My idea for a new Firefox Preloader:

  • started by “firefox -preload”
  • creates Icon in SysTray and the equals on the other OS
  • has same Options as “old” Preloader

By this I want to mention that the “old” preloader is a hack too because it opens just a window and tries to hide this which does not always work.

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Java (1.5) on Edgy 64

No Java in the repositories and I can’t find a .deb-package, so I have to try again an other way than I would like. The first step is to download the self-extracting Linux x64 RPM from the Sun Java Download page. After the download, you must give the extractor executing rights by

chmod u+x jre-1_5_0_09-linux-amd64-rpm.bin

Now run the executable and accept the license, after that it will extract the rpm-File and will fail to run rpm with the message:

./jre-1_5_0_09-linux-amd64-rpm.bin: 644: rpm: not found

or

rpm: To install rpm packages on Debian systems, use alien. See README.Debian.

Fehler: cannot open Packages index using db3 - No such file or directory (2)

Fehler: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm

If you get the first error you have to install alien, the other one shows us that we are on a Debain system. Now we could proceed in converting our package from rpm to deb and install it.

sudo alien -d –scripts jre-1_5_0_09-linux-amd64.rpm

sudo dpkg -i jre_1.5.0_09-1_amd64.deb

Because java is not in a ordinary binary-directory, we add it to the search-path by appending the following line to the ~/.bashrc:


export PATH=/usr/java/jre1.5.0_09/bin:$PATH

To test the new Java installation, I’ll try FreeMind using the .deb-Files from the sf.net-Page, so that we fully care about dpkg & Co. For Freemind you need some packages which are luckily available in universe, so that we just install them and after that FreeMind

sudo apt-get install librelaxng-datatype-java libcommons-lang-java libcommons-codec-java


sudo dpkg -i freemind_0.8.0+01-4_all.deb freemind-plugins-help_0.8.0+01-4_all.deb freemind-plugins-time_0.8.0+01-4_all.deb libforms-java_1.0.5-3_all.deb libjcalendar-java_1.2.2-7_all.deb

And finally it works!!!!

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Using the Firefox Preloader with the Browserversion No. 2

First, everybody who does not know what the “Firefox Preloader” is, I’ll explain it.  But that’s not really why I’m writing this article, with the new 2.0 releases there is a major problem, where the Session Restorer thinks that Firefox crashed.

Normally, on Windows, when you start Internet Explorer, it’ll be immediately shown because it’s integrated in the system. Firefox just needs 10-20s to start, in cause of this, someone wrote the program Firefox Preloader which loads parts of Firefox into the RAM so that the Firefox-windows open immediately too.

With Firefox 2.0  there occurred a problem with the Preloader and the Session Restore Manager, which always thinks Firefox crashed last time, the only solution at the moment, is to turn off the Session Manager, so that Firefox Preloader starts quietly without showing this Session Restore window. Disabling the Session Manager is easily done by going to about:config. There perform a  right-click and choose New->Boolean, name it browser.sessionstore.enabled and add the value false.

Now there will no more annoying Session Restore Popups at System Start.

Notice: This is a translation of the German Article Preloader mit Firefox 2.0, which was highly requested.



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Flash 9 & Co on an AMD64 Ubuntu Linux

Everyone who has a 64bit Linux installed, knows that there are some programs only available for 32bit, e.g. Flash 9 Beta, VmWare Player, Flock(yes, it’s opensource, but I failed to compile it) etc…. Now I don’t want to live without them so I thought about some solutions, searching at Google,Yahoo & Co gave me no answer, me first try, running a 32bit Linux using XEN(using Vanderpool), but when reading “The XEN kernel fails often when booting with closed-source drivers like ForceWare(nVidia) or fglrx(ATI)”, I stoped, because a stable 3D system is more important to me.

My second thougth was creating a vServer, from which I start the apps and tunnel X through ssh, this would be not as fastest as native executing, but the fastest way using virtualization. My luck was, that Edgy had ready-made vServer-debs, but after installing and creating, it always argued about an missing “compat API”, so next step….

Because VmWare does not run, I’ll have to use the slower QEMU, which still was running quite fast, but when I was trying to access the ssh of the guest from the host, I never came through. I tried many solutions found in forums like creating a virtual tun/tap bridge, but none worked.

Next day at work I was told to search for a lib32-package, and really there was a “libc6-i386″ package. After instaling this and the ia32-gtk-libs Flash 9 and Flock and … ran natively, but not VmWare would be still not able to run, because it uses its own kernel module(I didn’t try it!). Was really to easy to get them running, just not documented….
For all of you, not knowing, why 32bit apps can’t work together with 64bit apps, 32bit apps use a 32bit address for accessing the RAM, 64bit uses 64bit ;-).

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