With the record attempt due today for Firefox 3 downloads, I thought that it would be a good time for me to update my advice for getting BBC’s iPlayer going in Firefox running on Ubuntu. First, you need RealPlayer 11 for Linux. Once downloaded, the file RealPlayer11GOLD.bin needs to be made executable before running it with administrative privileges. The following command do this:

chmod +x RealPlayer11GOLD.bin

sudo ./RealPlayer11GOLD.bin

There is a catch though and it is that while the RealPlayer 11 installation is seamless for Firefox 2, the same cannot be said for Firefox 3 because directory locations have been changed such plugins are now found in /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins. The result that copies of or symbolic links to nphelix.xpt and nphelix.so are needed in that location. The following commands do the trick:

sudo ln -s /opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.xpt /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/nphelix.xpt

sudo ln -s /opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/nphelix.so

To cap all of this, I have seen advice that libtotem-complex-plugin.so needs to be removed from the Firefox plugins directory as well. I am not sure about this but I did that and all is working well for me. Let’s hope that continues to be the case.

On Ubuntu, I made a move to using Ubuntuzilla’s deployment of Firefox. Because Firefox’s Gecko engine is used by other parts of Ubuntu, any Firefox updates issued by Mozilla don’t come through straight away. The idea of using Ubuntuzilla is that you get Mozilla’s latest, be it Firefox, Thunderbird or Seamonkey, without having an impact on the rest of the Linux installation; Ubuntu’s Firefox is left in place but you are now presented with the vanilla Firefox for all your web surfing needs. Visually, there’s not much change but for the built-in Firefox application fonts coming through in the new instance, a strange sight when you see Ubuntu’s more subtle alternatives everywhere else. I tried the new tack to see if picked up RealPlayer in place of Xine but that sadly has not been the case. Nevertheless, I now have 2.0.0.9 and the latest improvements this side of version 3.

It seems a little strange to my eyes but Evolution cannot import Outlook PST files. On one level, I see a certain amount of sense: after all, Outlook is a Windows application and Evolution remains resolutely on the Linux side of the divide. Nevertheless, it is still a pesky nuisance. The cure is, very oddly, to import data from Outlook into Mozilla Thunderbird and pop the Thunderbird files into the Evolution mail folder. Both Evolution and Thunderbird share the same file formats so all is hunky dory since Evolution should just realise that they are there and bring them in. That’s what happened for me and I have now migrated all of my old emails. Evolution’s single file import wizard is there for those times when a spot of extra persuasion is needed; the data files are those without the file extensions. As it happened, I didn’t need it.

On my web design journey, I have learned the wisdom that CSS styles for hyperlinks should be defined like the following:

a:link {…}

a:visited {…}

a:hover {…}

a:active {…}

List out the names of the pseudoselectors and you’ll soon work out where they got LVHA: Link, Visited, Hover and Active. However, I have recently spotted the following being used:

a {…}

a:hover {…}

The trick here is to define your style globally and only define specifics for the relevant pseudoselector, hover in this example. It works well in the likes of Mozilla and Opera but Internet Explorer is another story. Even IE7 needs the LVHA treatment. I spotted this when I observed unexpected changes in the appearance of link text after visiting the link: visited links startes to change colour. While I know that the likes of Jakob Nielsen frown upon non-changing link colour, I choose to ignore this and keep it constant so following the LVHA approach is needed to keep things as I would like them.

With the launch of the ill-fated Communicator, Netscape dispensed with the Navigator brand that had served it so well up to that point. And it continued the practice when it turned to re-branding the output from the Mozilla project. The new Navigator is, in essence, a tweaked variant of Firefox’s latest incarnation and has the spelling checking capability that I have been missing when giving Safari a spin. You have to ask why and I am not sure that I have the answer. That said, it does feel slick and works well, a definite change from some of it predecessors then.

Firefox 2.0.0.2 has made its appearance and the CPU usage bug seems to have gone away. We’ll see how it goes… Also, a new version of the Accuweather.com powered ForecastFox plug-in has come out. It was when I was using it that I noticed heavy CPU usage but the behaviour has yet to make its reappearance and I hope it never will. Now, I can get back to enjoying this very useful widget.