mintCast Episode 15: Firefox Add-ons
In this episode
Windows 7 Default UAC is insecure
Intel to pay $1.45 billion in antitrust case
10 Free Linux Ebooks For Beginners
Firefox Add-ons
Web site of the week
More info
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Cooliris was previously known as piclens, btw, great episode!
Mint 7 final is on ftps now, so should be officially released any time.
I wrote a small article on Zotero at technographer.net/zotero – it is an interesting tool, although a bit annoying on small screens.
By the way, you were discussing the results of running Linux distributions in general and Mint in particular.
I have been running for a long time on a Thinkpad T40p with a 1.6 GHz Pentium M, 384 MB RAM and a 32MB graphics card. Linux Mint feels very much at home on this machine. I am even informed that I am not using any closed drivers – I have just installed and completely updated Gloria RC1. It runs extremely smoothly and boots, I believe, faster to login than my WinXP install.
Regarding the hard drive question, you should probably elaborate on the fact that the user’s problem is a general harddisk geometry issue rather than a GNU/Linux one. I have 10 partitions on my machine, where all my Linux distributions and swap are on logical partitions, while I have kept the primary partitions free for storage, my WinXP installation without internet access – and the BSDs, which don’t agree with anything but primary partitions.
While it is not a problem to suggest virtual machines to a user with 4 Gigs of RAN, it should be noted that there is not actually any problem with partitioning his drive with logical partitions – and that would be the solution for a user with a less potent machine than the one who asked the question.
OK, I’ve stopped sending you e-mails, so let’s continue here 🙂
In the show you say http://www.twitter.com which is not right as twitter is non-WWW page. I see you’ve corrected that in this post. Good.
Now regarding greasemonkey. I was surprised that you didn’t mention userscripts.org as the primary source to get the scripts. And also, I believe that’s the correct term user scripts, not greasemonkey scripts.
They also work on other browsers, including Opera, Mindori, and others.
Another great show guys. Mucho helpful information yet again. Just wanted to second the request for a show regarding themes and customizing the look of Mint. More than anything I would just like an explanation of the different components that seem to be involved: Metacity, Emerald, Compiz. I see these names tossed around a lot on the forums but I still don’t have a clear understanding of how they’re related. Just a thought. Regardless, keep up the great work!
Consider mentioning the authentication issue with the Mint packages. Installing packages and getting the “can not be authenticated” comment is a bit spooky. If you have an explanation, comment and perhaps even fix, many would be interested to hear it, I think.
Another very interesting show, thank you. Isn’t it funny though, you didn’t mention a single Firefox add-on that I use – just goes to show how many good ones there must be. My essential top five are;
1. British English Dictionary (must have spell checking whilst using webmail apps)
2. IE Tab (must have for those sites that only work with IE, but you don’t want to leave Firefox – Windows only)
3. Abduction (must have for getting small size picture file screen shots of web pages)
4. Table tools (must have for sorting and filtering html tables on screen, very useful for my work at least)
5. Download status bar (a better way to download and carry on browsing, in my opnion)
Keep up the great work.
I actually do use IE Tab on my windows computer (but didn’t think it would be relevant for the podcast) and I go back and forth on Download status bar. I find that I keep my downloads cleaned up more if I use the built in download manager but I do like the features of Download status bar. I also go back and forth with Download them all. It isn’t really a must have, but it does help in certain situations. Thanks for the comment.
I just found this comment. First, thank you Charles & Rothgar for answering my question. I will look into using Virtual Box and maybe you can do something on it in your future podcasts.
Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér thanks for your input. I have read about many partitions on one HD with many OSs but I haven’t tried it yet. Now is a good time to try though as I am ready to reformat my linux box. I plan to set up Win7 RC, Mint, Ubuntu, PC-BSD, openSUSE, etc. Of course most computer instructions are not always clear and seem to leave out something that the author assumes you know. I read terms like primary, logical, extended, dedicated & swap partitions. I think I understand it but usually in application I run into problems. Any suggestions on some good articles on how to do this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Great cast guys! I just recently started using linux again. I started with Red Hat 8 back in 2002 or so and hated it. I’ve really enjoyed Linux Mint and think i’ll be sticking with it. You guys have so much great information and it’s improved my linux experience by tons! Hope to see more!
Consider mentioning the authentication issue with the Mint packages. Installing packages and getting the “can not be authenticated” comment is a bit spooky. If you have an explanation, comment and perhaps even fix, many would be interested to hear it, I think .
I thought you guys did not give Foxmarks (now called Xmarks) a fare chance. 🙂 I personally think it is better than delicious. In fact it would make my #2 spot of the top 5 plugins. Don’t want to repeat what is already available at http://www.xmarks.com/about/features
Gil, This may be too late for you, but:
In the old days of PCs, DOS based partitioning was rather simple, and we are living with the legacy of that. Windows fdisk should have been upgraded to work like a real partitioner, but it hasn’t, so linux and BSD partitioning have to live with DOS style partitioning, since they are usually being installed on a Windows machine.
Partitioning is a way of breaking up a hard disk into chunks, each of which looks like a separate drive, but isn’t. The original DOS partitioning scheme allowed for breaking a disk up into 4 pieces. That’s all. These were the primary partitions.
As hard disks got bigger and more people wanted to do more things, they wanted more partitions. Instead of fixing fdisk to make it work like a real partitioner, MS simply faked it out.
You can still have only 4 primaries. However, one of these primaries can be designated an extended partition. Normally what people do is make 2-3 primaries, say 10 GB each, then make an extended partition, which is the rest of the drive. At that point, you can create logical partitions inside the extended. That’s how you get more than 4 partitions, by making the rest logicals.
For example, on my HD, 1 & 2 are primaries, 3 is extended, and 5-11 are logicals inside of part. 3. I usually keep 2-3 primaries, since there are some OSs (notably the BSDs) which can’t be installed to a logical.
A swap partition is nothing more than one of the partitions that is designated as swap space. It does not have a file system installed, at least not one you would recognize, since its under control of the OS. The swap partition is normally initialized with the mkswap command, which your installation program does for you automatically.
The difference between windows swap and linux swap is that windows uses a swap FILE, ie, swap is resident in a file on the file system, whereas linux and BSD use their own partition. You may or may not need a swap partiton with linux, depending on how much memory you have and how many programs, etc you run. I have 2GB, and I have yet to see my system begin to use swap space. But I always create about a 1GB swap, just in case.
Hope this helps.