In a previous post of mine, I showed you how to allow Firefox to keep using the Google Toolbar even though it lists as “unsupported” since firefox-5. But this is not a long-term option of course – at some point the plugin will become incompatible because it is no longer being developed and it will de-stabilize my browser.

So I was thinking, what are the reasons why I wanted to stick with the Google toolbar for so long? The plugin has some great features which I really don’t want to miss. Let me list them here, along with ways to get the same or similar functionality in Firefox but without using the Google Toolbar.

1. Search through my search history. I guess this is is the feature I use most. Of course, Firefox keeps an accessible history of the URLs you visited, but re-using previous search phrases is something different. The Google Toolbar showed your entire search history in a neat dropdown. But this functionality is also present in Firefox’s own search field… I just never knew. If you type a single space character into the search entry field, then Firefox will display a dropdown with all your previous search phrases.
2. Translate web pages. Using this a lot as well, to find out what those damn Russians are telling about Slackware… but there are other plugins that add the same functionality to your right-click context menu in Firefox. One that seems to get the best reviews because of its feature set is gTranslate. One disadvantage compared to the googlebar is, that it does not give me the option to translate a complete web page, it is limited to translating selected bits of text.
3. Bookmark sync. When you work on many different computers and want your bookmarks available everywhere, then Google Toolbar woould let you. However, Firefox has its own “sync” functionality since version 4 which allows you to sync your bookmarks, history and other stuff to a central server, much like Google does too. And if you do not want to rely on 3rd party servers you can always setup your own private bookmark server like I did, using SiteBar. A killer feature of SiteBar is that it has ACLs (access control lists) allowing users of the service to share (parts of) their bookmarks with other users or groups.
4. Use highlighted text to search in Google. It is so convenient to just highlight a piece of text and then right-click to use that text as a search phrase in Google. It is a must-have feature for me, but luckily there is an add-on called Context Search which will even expand the list of selectable search engines to beyond just Google.

Well that was not all that many reasons for needing the Google Toolbar, but even then: their value is high because of the way they allow me to be more productive and efficient in my work. I guess I will have to give the alternatives a try and see if I can live without the Google Toolbar. Realizing that I have to, I can only say “so long, and thanks for all the fish” to the people who have been developing this plugin over the years.

While I am at it, I think I am also going to try out Right-Click-Link (opening URLs in a new tab that are listed in a page as plain text), which seem to be useful as well.

Eric

Infected by Google Chrome’s release strategy, it seems like the Mozilla developers now think that jumping to new version numbers fast, while abandoning their older release, is a good thing to do. Their rationale, “the web is changing fast and our software should keep the same pace” sounds valid, but I predict that it will negatively affect their usage statistics.

Read this blog entry which voices concern over the deployment of Firefox in enterprise environments and especially Mozilla’s director for the Firefox browser (Asa Dotzler)’s comment… I do not think he did the right thing by downplaying the corporate environment in which most of us have to spend 40 hours every week.

I work in two different “corporate environments”: one is that of my employer (IBM) where we have standardized on Firefox but internal IT keeps tight control over versioning and features… I guess IBM can do that. And then I face the IT landscape of my customer where Internet Explorer is king and open source / open standards adepts are fighting an uphill battle in getting Firefox accepted as a viable alternative.

Leaving alone all the enterprise stuff for a bit, what consequences has this new Mozilla strategy for you and me, Slackware users? Well hum.

It became obvious very soon after running slackpkg and upgrading to the latest slackware-current… I started Firefox and was greeted with the message that my Google Toolbar extension would be disabled because supposedly it is not compatible with Firefox 5.0:

I know, some of you consider that toolbar a piece of legalized spyware, but it keeps my search history available to me and not just Google (what do you think happens with all the search queries you enter in a Google search?) and I like it. So… I wanted it back ASAP.

It is most unfortunate that Google no longer considers the Toolbar as the ultimate weapon to get their Google services onto everybody’s desktop; now they have their own browser, Chrome, and that gets all the attention. This means that updating the Toolbar to the latest Firefox requirements does not have a lot of priority.

There is a way around it, which does not involve waiting for Google, and does not require any other software to be installed. Adding one configuration setting is all:

• Open the Firefox configuration window by typing “about:config” in the URL entry field
• Right-click on any of the items displayed and select “New” and then “Boolean“
• The name of the new entry should be “extensions.checkCompatibility.5.0” and its value should be set to “False“
• Then, restart your Firefox browser.

If you open your add-on configuration Window now (“Extra > Add-ons“), you will see that the compatibility check has been disabled for Firefox 5.0! And you will also see that the Google Toolbar (and possibly other so-called incompatible add-ons) are enabled again – at your own risk of course:

I hope this helps some of you.

Cheers, Eric

In a few days’ time, there were new releases of major and highly visible pieces of software: VLC, LibreOffice and KDE. I so happen to package all of these as “unofficial” additions to Slackware. I had a few hectic days (well, nights) preparing binaries, testing, rebuilding and writing changelogs and blog posts. I think it’s time for a bit of rest & relaxation, because I also have a stressful day job, and it was becoming a bit too heavy, all combined.

Praise to all of you, but please developers, get a drink, visit long-forgotten friends and let me get my breath back…

I think my next blog post will be a food recipe.

End of communication.

Ever since the community around OpenOffice.org decided to free this productivity suite from its new guardian Oracle, it was clear that working together is the true driving force behind innovation. The continued development of the same software but with a new name “LibreOffice” took several leaps and bounds by incorporating the enhancements developed independently under the name of “go-oo” and other offshoots. The addition of these enhancements had been withheld for a long time by its previous guardian SUN.

Don’t forget: this software has a long and fruitful history. Being open sourced by Sun was the highly appreciated move that gave “us”, free software lovers, an office suite that could match (or at least aspired to match) with the dominant Microsoft Office. At that time, it felt like an arrow driven right into the heart of Microsoft. Their own Office suite is (was?) their cash cow, it’s what drives their profit. I can do nothing else but applaud Sun for assimilating and then freeing StarOffice. Alas… Sun is gone… but their legacy lives on.

So what is worth mentioning in this first stable release of the LibreOffice productivity suite?

I think the basic support for OOXML document format (Microsoft’s sort-of ISO standard which they pitched against the truely open OpenDocument Format ODF) is what will draw a lot of people to LibreOffice, because it is able to write to this document format – a feature that is not supported by OpenOffice.Org (it supports reading/converting this format only). So, LibreOffice might be better equipped to let you deal with friends, collegues and customers who want to share their Microsoft Office (version 2007, not the newer 2010 OOXML format) documents with you. LibreOffice does not have difficulties with VBA script in your documents either. The older Microsoft Office, Lotus WordPro and Microft Works file formats are supported as well. Even PDF import is built-in.

LibreOffice Draw can import and edit SVG files. That is a feature I still have to test, since I am used to Karbon14.

What can I say? It is a professional productivity suite that I would recommend to anyone.

Now, you want to install this LibreOffice on your Slackware box, right?

Just a wee bit of patience then: I would like to add that the “stable release” 3.3.0 is bit-for-bit identical to the last (fourth) release candidate that was published a few days earlier. The source taballs have remained the same, and still bear the old version number 3.3.0.4. The official binaries have been renamed, is all.

But I have recompiled the Slackware package nevertheless, because I intended to add some extra language packs: cs (Czech), el (Greek), en_GB (UK English), he (Hebrew), hr (Croatian), pa (Punjabi), uk (Ukrainian), ur (Urdu) and zh_TW (Traditional Chinese). What I did not do, even though I mentioned I wanted to, is to add dictionaries (spell-checkers) for some of the major world languages. It took too long to figure out how to package and install them properly so I reserve that as an exercise for later.

Go get the packages!

• http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (US mirror)
• http://www.slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (UK mirror)

There is an rsync access as well:

• rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/

Be productive!

Eric

There is a pending KDE 4.5.0 release, which needs to be built for slackware-current. Then there is also VLC 1.1.2 which was released a few days ago… and those packages need to be built for Slackware 13.1 (so that they can join my main repository). I have only one “build box” which is fairly old and sporting a CPU without hardware virtualization capabilities.

Decisions, decisions… there’s only 24 hours in a day.

So I decided to start with building a test set of KDE 4.5.0 (the sources of which I already have) because that will be a big event for a lot of people, and leave the new VLC for another time. Don’t worry! Linux users will find that the 1.1.2 release of VLC does not offer anything worthwhile, except perhaps for some bugfixes in the DVB (digital video) module. The VLC 1.1.1 packages which I have created for Slackware are still very much OK.

Having to build packages for Slackware 13.1 as well as -current, and for two architectures (32-bit and 64-bit) is proving a bit too much for that old computer (which happens to be my home desktop as well), so I decided to use the donation money that has been accumulating and order an Athlon II X4 640 boxed CPU, along with an Asus M4N68T motherboard and 8 GB of RAM, completed with a 2 TB SATA hard drive. Once all that arrives on my doorstep, I will assemble a full computer using the case I have here (with a motherboard that caught fire last month because of a crappy condensator). That machine will become my new server.

Thanks to all of you who took the trouble to click my PayPal button – you know who you are, even if I did not thank you in person. Your gracious gifts will be spent with the purpose of making Slackware an even better experience.

By the way – I intend to use qemu-kvm to run a load of virtual machines on that computer, so that it will be easier to build in parallel. I have been considering VMware, VirtualBox and Xen as well. I decided against VMware for being closed-source. VirtualBox could still find its way onto the computer at some later stage; I decided against it because of the mixed license model where you get additional functionality only in the closed-source version. And Xen, well I am quite interested in how that works and performs, but unfortunately it requires a patched “xenified” kernel for the host and Linux guest. That was one bridge too far for me.

Nevertheless, there was a recent post from Chris Abela on the slackbuilds.org mailing list about the “The Xenification of Slack” which will most certainly help Slackware users get jumpstarted into the Xen world. Worth checking out, there is a tarball attached to that post with scripts and configuration files. Well done.

Enough of this, time for a beer.

Cheers, Eric

Ogg Video – being the open source and royalty-free container used for the HTML5 video tag – is not favoured by the big players with commercial interests in web standards and content. There is really only one alternative to Ogg’s Theora video codec which is widely accepted: and that is the H.264 codec used for instance in Apple’s MP4/Quicktime video container.

But H264 video (also well-known because Youtube streams its content in H.264) is not royalty- or patent-free. The MPEG-LA company has formed a patent pool for H.264 and administers license fees for its use in applications and appliances.

However it was decided that creating, distributing and viewing Internet H.264 video content is royalty-free until at least the year 2015, as long as that content is being made freely available. A lot of people interpret this ruling as “H.264 is a free and open standard“… but this is not true. The patent holders (Microsoft and Apple being part of that group) maintain that even after 2015, H.264 video will stay free from royalty fees. I don’t know about you, but those two companies are among the ones I do not trust at all when they make statements like that.

So, a lot of folk kept an eye on Google after that company acquired On2, the creator of the VP8 video codec (and several more). On2 had already opensourced one of their older video codecs. This was their VP3 codec which was given to the Xiph.Org foundation and became…. the Theora codec. It was rumoured that Google would let history repeat itself and opensource VP8. And today, that has indeed happened.

Google announced that they release the VP8 video codec under a royalty-free open-source license. They have defined a new video container, called WebM, which will use VP8 for video  and Ogg Vorbis for the audio stream. Basically, WebM is a Matroska container (MKV) with some restrictions. The image quality and compression rate of VP8 is comparable to that of H.264, something which can not be said about Theora. I believe that this new video format is destined to become the true rival to H.264 in HTML5.

Microsoft had recently announced that they would only support H.264 video in their implementation of HTML5, but the company stated today that it prepares to add support for the VP8 video codec in Internet Explorer 9. IE9 will use the VP8 codec… if the user has installed it on Windows. Well, it’s a start. And Adobe plans to include VP8 in the Flash 10.1 player. They have to, after the crusade started by Microsoft and Apple to replace Flash Video on the web with H.264.

Interesting times ahead! Now, what would happen if Google decided to switch Youtube’s videos from H.264 to VP8? That would be a big statement. If they plan this, it will be like droppping a bomb in the cradle of Internet content providers.

VideoLAN’s VLC media player (one of my favourite open source projects) already has the code to support VP8 once that codec gets added to ffmpeg, the engine of so many media players. The VideoLAN foundation also hosts the open source x264 encoder which is arguably the best free H.264 encoder available. There will be freedom of choice, people! That is always commendable.

Speaking about freedom – I am praising this Google initiative of course, but I do not want to be negative about Ogg. A lot of people seem to complain about it’s shortcomings but it was – and is – a truely free video container format. If not for Google and their VP8, the Ogg format would still be the only choice for truely free content creation. I totally love Xiph.Org. Read this excellent article by the hand of its chief engineer Monty (Christopher Montgomery) in which he defends what is dear to him: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/lj-pseudocut/o-response-1.html

And now, time for a beer.

Eric

It seems that it is becoming more fashionable for other bloggers to actively work on increasing their own blog’s  popularity. How they do that? Simple: by visiting other blogs and leaving a comment there which contains a link to their own blog… thus creating these highly desired backlinks themselves.

I have found several of these comments on my own blog, and I will delete such postings if if I think they were only added here to generate income for that other web site. I hate doing this, but hey, come on!

Eric

Well, I am one of these people. I have been using MPLayer a lot – it builds relatively easily and because it uses Windows codec DLL’s it supports a multitude of audio and video formats. But it is not cross-platform, and it does not give me a happy experience when I use MPlayer to watch DVD’s (the way it handles DVD menus is clumsy at best). And why do I still have to use these Windows codecs when I am running Linux??

The videolan project addresses my issues with MPlayer. Once started as a student project at the French École Centrale Paris it is now an international development effort. The videolan flagship product is VLC (it used to be called the VideoLan Client). VLC is a cross-platform media player which supports many multimedia formats as well as input- and output devices through a plugin architecture. The project went through some tough times when many of the core developers left around two years ago. Ever since, the 0.8.6.x versions have matured so that the current version is stable and great to use. Around the same time, development on a re-designed version of VLC – using Qt4 instead of wxWidgets as it’s GUI – was started.

It is probably due to the fact that the remaining developers plus those who joined the team in the past two years had to figure out VLC’s architecture that it took them so long to produce a version of the 0.9.x series that is stable enough to be useable.

I have had a package for the VLC 0.8.6 series in my repository for some time now, and have been using this alongside MPlayer. I have videos on my hard drive that play fine in MPLayer while VLC will just choke on it, so unfortunately I can not just ditch the MPLayer. The VLC developers tell me that this is a sign of a badly encoded video, and that VLC is not going to try and make the best of it like MPlayer (successfully) does. I think that is just too bad, because this philosophy prevents VLC from being the best media player all around.

Anyway… I had to give that rant a place. Let’s continue with the actual post.

Now that vlc 0.9.1 has been released as source only (the developers do not consider it stable enough to release official binary packages) I decided to upload a Slackware package for it. I have been building betas for many months now, and was not impressed at all by it’s terrible instability, hard lock-ups, and lack of media support. But surpsisingly, the 0.9.1 release shows that an enormous amount of work has been done in the past month, and this version is actually enjoyable. I invite everyone who wants to find out how well it runs, to download my package at one of these locations:

• http://slackware.org.uk/3rd-party/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlctest/ (a version with MP3/AAC/AMR encoders built in)
• http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlctest/ (with the patent-afflicted MP3/AAC/AMR encoders left out of the build)

and tell me what you think of it.

Also, you may want to re-build the package in case you already have the Qt4 libraries installed – for instance when you have KDE4.x on your system. The static Qt4 library in the VLC package adds a full 8 MB to it’s size. When you want to make use of the system Qt4 instead in order to slim down the VLC package, you need to run the following commandlines (as root) to download build script and sources, and compile these into a Slackware package:

# lftp -c “open http://slackware.org.uk/ ; cd 3rd-party/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlctest/ ; mirror build”

# cd build

# STATIC_QT4=NO sh vlc.SlackBuild

Note: if any of the required source tarballs are missing from your system, the script will download them automatically. You will find the “vlc-0.9.1-i486-1alien.tgz” Slackware package in the /tmp directory after the compilation has finished.

Enjoy! Eric