Mozilla – The New Firefox, and Thunderbird

Recently, I just disovered an awesome Firefox Addon. It doesn’t really help in productivity, but it is visually appealing. But, I mean, some would argue that if one thing isn’t visually appealing, that it wouldn’t help in productivity. I agree with that statement because you’re only as good as your environment is. If you’re in a place with less distraction, nicely painted, and visually pleasing, you want to be there, and be square about being there and doing whatever you need to do. Heck, you may even want to stay where ever you are, and never leave.

I’m at this point with Firefox. After using many other browsers in the past, I’ve never been happier in geekdom. The appearance of Firefox, and Thunderbird now has made my Desktop, or GNOME desktop environment visually pleasing. I can customize the look of Firefox, or Thunderbird to make it stand out and not just let it drap around like I did before. I won’t lie, I even did it with Firefox, and various others.

As mentioned before, they’re not really for producitivity. Personas for Firefox are more visually pleasing to the eye than anything. It lets you customize the looks of Firefox, or Thunderbird just like any other theme available for Gnome, or KDE but, it’s only for Firefox, or Thunderbird. They’re simply skins which is driven by the commity of users who want to create their own. You can design, and upload your own which will individualize your browser.  There are hundreds of artist-created skins as well.

What makes Personas really shine is the ability to look at them via your own browser – just by opening the browser up. Once Personas are installed, the bottom left side of the bar Foxy’s head appears. Just simply click on the head, and you can have your choice of what skin to use. There’s a huge variety of whatever you want. Even hovering over each skin that’s in the addon, it will change the theme while just hovering over the picture(or name) with your mouse.

It’s easily one of the best addons I’ve used because of the quality of the addon, and the aesthics are pleasing to the eye like I’ve mentioned before.

NOTE

Personas come as a default installation with Firefox-3b5. However, if you want to use Personas in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope’s version of Firefox which is Firefox-3.0.10 you’ll have to download the addon. And, if you don’t have Firefox, and want to download and install Firefox to use Personas – here’s the URL: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html

To use Personas in Thunderbird, you’ll have to download the beta version of Thunderbird which is Thunderbird-3b2, and install Personas via the URL above. Download the .xpi file, and install the addon like any other addon. You’ll come to an “install” button in the window – just browse to the file and press ok to install. Here’s the link to the Thunderbird download page.

In Jaunty Jackalope, I downloaded Thunderbird into /opt so I have the beta, and stable versions so if the beta messes up, I have the stable to use. Just symlink the thunderbird executable in /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird into /usr/bin. Here’s the code: “sudo ln -s /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird /usr/bin/thunderbird3″ without quotes. This will let you have two working Thunderbirds in an installation. Create a new profile with, “thunderbird3 -P”. Howto in the ubuntuforums.

Hopefully this helps you.
Enjoy.

Justin

The Mozilla: Firefox Update

What internet browser do you use? Hopefully not internet explorer, or Opera. Firefox has been awesome ever since I’ve stepped foot into using it. I love the user interface, the way I can handle addons(or plugins), the way it performs, and the ability to do whatever I want with it. It just keeps getting better, and better.

Prior blog posts I’ve named off a few addons I’ve used, and still use. Some addons I don’t use, and addons I’ve moved onto something better  because they’ve simply evolved, or there’s just simply something better out. There’s going to be more of that because Mozilla just changed how addons are made with jetpack. Jetpack is an API that will be far more superior than a lot of things they have done. Now any user that knows html/css or javascript can make addons for the browser. This is a good step that Mozilla put forth for the user because now it’s not an impossible task for the user to make something of their browser and have a choice. You don’t need to be a programmer, or know what you’re doing to customize the addon you want. Someone with no knowledge can have the ability to make addons and fool around with the API with the various examples on the Mozilla Labs website where you get Jetpack. With this going for Mozilla, I think it’s going to help a new breed of programmers, and people who do want to learn how to program, or code since it’s possible to do so. It’s not an impossible task. You can learn how to interact with an extensive API, and see the changes you want to see right after a refresh of the browser.

Jetpack as stated is an API for web development languages which means it’s good for the web-2.0 crowd. If you want a Digg counter on your bottom panel of Firefox, it’s possible. If you want a switch to turn off ads and other such things that are annoying, you can. What about removing embedded movies, or objects? It’s possible. What about statistics, and a graph? It’s possible! There are endless possiblities that anyone can explore.

I’ve yet to try this addon yet, but it does look interesting, and has me intrigued. I have it installed, and ready to go in Firefox-3b5. I’m more of a user than anything. I’m not a developer, I don’t code. I am part of a community of users, programmers, and activists. At least I’d like to think I am. Linux is a wonderful thing.

Jetpack – A Call For Participants
Mozilla Labs – Jetpack

All images © to their respected owners.

Music Player Daemon: Sonata Notifications with Notify-OSD .:Tutorial & Disclaimer Inside:.

Last night I finally installed, and configured MPD proper. All my configured files that I needed to create are in my ~/.mpd folder now. So I don’t need to run MPD as root anymore. I like MPD so much better than Banshee. It has freed up a lot more resources and it’s a lot faster. Not only that, but I can also pick a nice frontend for MPD, or just use MPC or any other commandline interface front-end, or GTK, QT, Java front-end available.

Ever since I’ve looked into Music Player Daemon years ago, I always liked Sonata from the beginning because of the UI. So, I went with that front-end, and I’ve been a lot more happier since. The interface is a lot smaller than Banshee, but I can also make it a very small interface as well. Sorting and making playlists is quite nice too. Everything is so compact compared to Banshee. I don’t miss Banshee at all. Mind you, Banshee was an awesome player, it was just too heavy on resources that I don’t have.

Doing some researching in google, I found that Sonata can do plug-ins. So, I installed the latest Jaunty version from get-deb, but I didn’t really feel right installing it from there. So I removed the program, downloaded subversion, and just compiled/ installed from SVN. The SVN version is pretty nice, too. A lot more improvement, and a few more tabs and options. But, there’s a reason why I installed from subversion. I found a plugin that enables me to use Notify-OSD type notifications like Jaunty’s notification system with Sonata.

If you want to install this plugin, make sure you install Sonata from SVN!

So, I used bzr to download the notification plugin for Sonata. All these SVN systems are a pain in the ass, but whatever. Anyway, download the plugin, follow this tutorial, and make “/usr/local/lib/sonata/plugins” move notify.py from your Desktop, to the said location, and it should! You’ll have awesome Jaunty style notifications for Sonata. They work beautiful thanks to the author of the plugin, and the people from Sonata for making such a beautiful front-end for MPD.Here’s how to install Sonata, and the plugin in Jaunty:

1. Open a terminal, type:

sudo apt-get install subversion bzr

2. Change to the Desktop/ directory, and use SVN in terminal:

cd Desktop && svn co http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/sonata/trunk sonata

That’ll download Sonata to your Desktop with SVN from the terminal.

3. Change your directory to Desktop/sonata, download pyGTK-2.6, install Sonata from the folder you just downloaded.

cd sonata && sudo su

4. You’ll see a prompt, enter your password and you’re in the terminal as root.

python python.py install

5. You’ll notice there will be an error, you’ll have to install PyGTK-2.6. Since you’re in root, you don’t have to use sudo.

apt-get install python-dev python-gtk2-dev python2.6-dev

6. Those were some of the packages I installed. I’m sure there will be a few more dependencies brought in. Now, try to install python.py again. Again, since you’re already as root, you don’t need to use sudo.

python python.py install

7. Now, you have a working installation of Sonata from SVN! Or, at least I hope you do because that was a shitload of typing.

Now, here comes the easier part.

Install Sonata Notifications From BZR

8. Go back a directory to Desktop

cd ..

NOTICE: The Two Dots!

9. You should be navigated to your Desktop now, use bzr to download the Sonata plugin, move to the directory of the plugin, install. If that command doesn’t work, do each command between the “&&” separately. I wanted to speed up the process. I didn’t use the “&&” I installed with each command per line, but this should work. If it doesn’t my shell scripting sucks, don’t blame me. Just do each command separate as mentioned above.

bzr branch lp:~l3on/sonata/sonata-plugins && cd sonata-plugins && mkdir /usr/local/lib/sonata/ && mkdir /usr/local/lib/sonata/plugins && mv sonata-plugins/notify.py /usr/local/lib/sonata/plugins

10. Start up Sonata, go into the plugin directory, enable the notification plugin and it should work!

Disclaimer: I’m not responsible for any damages done to your hardware, installation, or mental anguish. Please do it at your own risk, and comfort of course!

Hopefully that covers everything, good luck.

Thank you, comments appreciated.

Justin

Here’s a couple URLs from the tutorial that were mentioned in this blog post:

Sonata SVN: http://sonata.berlios.de/download.html
Notification tutorial & BZR: http://en.leoiannacone.com/en/blog/2009/05/a-simple-plugin-for-sonata/