Lâmôlabs » firefox

[one-liner]: Firefox Already Running Dialog Box on Fedora/CentOS/RHEL

slmingol — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:53:30 +0000

Problem

Sometimes you’ll get a dialog box that pops up saying that firefox is already running when you know in fact that it isn’t.

Firefox Already Running Dialog Box

Solution

This is typically caused by the existence of 2 files in your ~/.mozilla/firefox/ directory. For example in my case:

1
2
3

% ls -la ~/.mozilla/firefox/rhwevaqa.default/|egrep "lock |lock$"
lrwxrwxrwx  1 tstacct users       16 2010-06-22 18:49 lock -> 127.0.1.1:+11131
-rw-r--r--  1 tstacct users        0 2010-06-22 18:49 .parentlock

Just delete these 2 files and firefox should start right up.

References

For more info about Firefox startup issues check out this mozilla FAQ

NOTE: For further details regarding my one-liner blog posts, check out my one-liner style guide primer.

[one-liner]: Getting Rid of Google’s Left Sidebar (2nd Attempt)

slmingol — Fri, 07 May 2010 14:54:00 +0000

Problem

In a previous [one-liner] post I mentioned a quick way to get rid of Google’s new Left Sidebar. Here’s a screenshot from that post of the Google sidebar.

Google Left Sidebar

Well as of May 2010 it appears that the Google sidebar is back, and my hack of just deleting the google.com cookies no longer seems to permanently get rid of the sidebar. So now it’s time to bring out a bigger stick … greasemonkey.

Solution

If you haven’t heard of greasemonkey, it’s a plugin to Firefox that allows you to control elements of a page that you are viewing, essentially overriding the design of a given page. You can do things like get rid of sidebars, add your own buttons, etc. I’m not going to get into everything it can do, we’re only interested in getting rid of Google’s sidebar, and with greasemonkey installed it becomes a simple task.

First click this link: greasemonkey plugin to Firefox, and click on the “Add to Firefox” button on that page. Restart Firefox to activate the greasemonkey plugin. Next you’ll want to make use of a greasemonkey “script” that is freely available over on userscripts.org.

NOTE: The userscripts.org website allows users to share useful greasemonkey scripts.

The greasemonkey script you’re looking for is called Toggle Google SideBar. Each “script” on the userscripts.org website has a big install button on their respective pages, so just click that button to install it. Once you’ve done that you’re done.

Now Google search results pages will look like this with the sidebar visible:

Google sidebar open

…and like this when the sidebar is hidden:

Google sidebar closed

Notice the big [+]? This allows you to toggle the Google sidebar if you want to see it.

NOTE: For further details regarding my one-liner blog posts, check out my one-liner style guide primer.

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Setting up Webex under Fedora 10

slmingol — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:16:17 +0000

These are some notes on how I was able to get Webex to work on my Fedora 10 laptop. Webex is a java application so to start we need to install java. I usually opt to use the real thing because I’ve never been able to get Ice Tea to successfully work with the webex app.

Installing Java

So to start I download java from java.com. Specifically I downloaded version 1.6u14. This will offer up a file, jre-6u14-linux-i586.rpm.bin. After saving that to disk you need to convert this file to it’s native RPM format. This can be accomplished with these commands.

# unpack RPM file
sh jre-6u14-linux-i586.rpm.bin
 
# install RPM
rpm -Uvh jre-6u14-linux-i586.rpm

Firefox Java Plugin

Once we have the java JRE installed we need to get the java plugin to be picked up by firefox. This can be accomplished by creating a unix link in firefox’s plugin directory, /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. Additionally I also usually create a link in my home directory, ~/.mozilla/plugin. I occasionally run into problems where firefox seems to get confused about which plugins are available when I only install them to the firefox’s main system directory, so I’ve just gotten in the habit of installing them in both directories.

# install plugin to firefox's main plugins dir
cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_14/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
 
# install plugin to user's firefox plugins dir
cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_14/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

At this point do a quick restart of firefox and you should see the plugin under the pull-down, Tools -> Addons, under the plugins tab.

java plugin added to firefox

Testing Webex

Now we can run a quick test to see if the webex demo works. To start, first go www.webex.com and click the View Demo link.

main page of webex.com

Next you’re presented with a form that you need to fill out. I usually just put some bogus info into this form.

webex demo form

After clicking the “Join Now” button the actual webex application will begin downloading. You’ll see this screen while it’s being downloaded.

webex app download

Finally the webex java app will start running and you’ll be presented with a dialog box asking if you want to trust the host which is serving the java app.

webex trust dialog box

This is pretty standard fare for Java’s webstart technology, which is the technology behind how java applications are served. You typically only get this dialog the first time, subsequent runnings of the webex app will go much quicker because the webex app will remain cached on your system. The only time you’ll be required to re-download it is when a newer version gets released by webex.

One final note: from this point the webex demo will come up. The demo does appear to only be available during business hours. I’m guessing 8:00AM EST to 5:00PM EST. During these times you’ll be directed to an actual webex presentation where you’ll see other people that are attempting to use the demo. You can chat etc. with these other users. Outside of these times the demo is just a video demo.

Firefox Plugins & Addons I use

slmingol — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:19:54 +0000

This report was generated via the “My Config” option available from the MR Tech’s Toolkit addon.

Generated: Wed May 06 2009 23:29:02 GMT-0400 (EDT)

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042315 Firefox/3.0.10

Build ID: 2009042315

Enabled Extensions: [21]

Adblock Plus 1.0.2
ColorfulTabs 3.9.1
Delicious Bookmarks 2.1.032
Download Statusbar 0.9.6.5
ErrorZilla Mod 0.34
FEBE 6.1
Firebug 1.4.0a14
Forecastbar Enhanced 0.9.6
Google Gears 0.5.16.0
Greasemonkey 0.8.20090123.1
Jiffy 1.0.20080619
MR Tech Toolkit 6.0.3.3
NoScript 1.9.2.6
printpdf 0.75
Read it Later 0.9945
Session Manager 0.6.5
SwitchProxy Tool 1.4.1
Tab Mix Plus 0.3.7.4pre.090107
UnMHT 5.2.0
Xmarks 3.1.0
YSlow 2.0.0b3

Disabled Extensions: [8]

Back to Top 5.3.2
Better Gmail 2 0.8.1
Better Lifehacker 0.4
Form Saver 0.9.0
FormFox 1.6.3
Greasefire 1.0.3
keyconfig 20080929
ScrapBook 1.3.3.9

Total Extensions: 29

Installed Themes: [1]

Default

Installed Plugins: (9)

Default Plugin
DivXÂ® Web Player
IcedTea Java Web Browser Plugin
Picasa
QuickTime Plug-in 7.2.0
Shockwave Flash
Totem Web Browser Plugin 2.24.3
VLC Multimedia Plugin (compatible Totem 2.24.3)
Windows Media Player Plug-in 10 (compatible; Totem)