Monday, May 30, 2011

Make Any Web Page Print Friendly

PrintFriendly cleans and formats web pages for perfect print experience. PrintFriendly removes ads, navigation and web page junk, so you save paper and ink when you print. It's free and easy to use.
Features :
Print Preview: Optimizes and displays content for print.
Edit Before Printing: Remove images, text, and print only what you want.
Print or Save as PDF: Print now, or save for later as a PDF.

How to use :
Copy and Paste a URL at PrintFriendly.com or
Add the bookmarklet

List Of About Pages In Google Chrome, Chromium-browser

Chromium-browser and Google Chrome offer a vast amount of information and statistics about the browser through its numerous about:pages.
To show an up-to-date list of these about:pages just type in the URL bar :
about:about
or
chrome://about/about/

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Running Iceweasel-5.0 And Iceweasel-4.0 Together On Squeeze

I'm running iceweasel-4.0 installed from http://mozilla.debian.net/.
Related packages are :
iceweasel 4.0.1-1~bpo60+1
xulrunner-5.0 5.0~b2-1~bpo60+1
libmozjs5d 5.0~b2-1~bpo60+1

If you want to try out iceweasel-5.0 and keep iceweasel-4.0 as well do the following :

Add the following line to your sources.list :
deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze-backports iceweasel-5.0
and run as root apt-get update .
We only need to download the deb package to get iceweasel-5.0, we don't install it ( otherwise iceweasel-4.0 will just be upgraded ). As root run :
apt-get install -d -t squeeze-backports iceweasel
This will download package iceweasel_5.0~b2-1~bpo60+1_amd64.deb in my case. You can find it back inside /var/cache/apt/archives .

As root run the following commands :
mkdir /usr/local/iceweasel5
dpkg-deb -x iceweasel_5.0~b2-1~bpo60+1_amd64.deb /usr/local/iceweasel5/
ln -s /usr/lib/xulrunner-5.0 /usr/local/iceweasel5/usr/lib
ln -s /usr/local/iceweasel5/usr/bin/iceweasel /usr/local/bin/iceweasel5


To verify :
which iceweasel5 gives :
/usr/local/bin/iceweasel5

Run iceweasel5 -P and create a new profile.

Make a shortcut to run iceweasel-5.0 :
iceweasel5 -P "profilename" -no-remote

Boot Info Script

Boot_info_script is a bash script which searches all hard drives attached to the computer for information related to booting. Its primary use is for troubleshooting booting problems.
Download from : http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript .
Extract the zip file to a directory of your choice.
unzip boot_info_script060.zip
Archive: boot_info_script060.zip
inflating: CHANGELOG
inflating: boot_info_script.sh

Or use file-roller in Gnome...

Then as root :
bash ./boot_info_script.sh
boot_info_script version: 0.60 [17 May 2011]

Identifying MBRs...
Computing Partition Table of /dev/sda...
Searching sda1 for information...
Searching sda2 for information...
Searching sda3 for information...

Finished. The results are in the file "RESULTS.txt"
located in "/home/eric/Downloads/".

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Multifox Extension : Sign Into Multiple Same-Service Accounts

Multifox is an extension that allows Firefox to connect to websites using different user names.

Once you have installed the Multifox extension there are three ways to access it :
Menu : File > New Identity Profile
Tabs Context Menu : rightclick any tab > Open in a New Identity Profile
Context Menu for your bookmarks : Bookmarks > rightclick any bookmark > Open in a New Identity Profile

Any of the three will cause a new and separate window to open. Counting starts from 2 : notice a blue square with a number at the end of the Address Bar.
Logins made in windows with different numbers are isolated.
Clicking on any of the blue numbered squares will open a drop-down window with basic information about that particular identity profile.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Kernel 2.6.38 in Squeeze Backports

Backports are recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates) in a stable environment so that they will run without new libraries (whenever it is possible) on a Debian stable distribution.
Add this line :
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main to your sources.list and run :
apt-get update
To install kernel 2.6.38 I did ( amd64) :
apt-get -t squeeze-backports install linux-image-2.6.38-bpo.2-amd64
I needed the headers as well, but I got the message : The following packages have unmet dependencies:
linux-headers-2.6.38-bpo.2-amd64: Depends: linux-kbuild-2.6.38


Solution : just download linux-kbuild-2.6.38 from http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/linux-kbuild-2.6.38 and install it with dpkg -i . Now you can install the kernel-headers as well from squeeze-backports.

Minor Scrolling Issues Iceweasel-4

I've had some minor scrolling issues with iceweasel-4 which mostly did not draw my attention until I came across this page : http://tech.shantanugoel.com/2009/07/07/virtualbox-high-cpu-usage-problem-solved.html. Scrolling was very choppy.....
Some background : system : Debian squeeze amd64 gnome, nvidia 270.41.19 ( nvidia.com ).
apt-cache policy iceweasel
iceweasel:
Installed: 4.0.1-1~bpo60+1
Candidate: 4.0.1-1~bpo60+1

........
I've tried different gtk-styles, different window-managers, disabled all plugins and extensions, created a new profile.....no improvement....
Some others things I've noticed : running iceweasel-4 in virtualbox ( minimal gnome installation Sid ) did not have these scrolling issues.....( so is nvidia to be blamed ? ).
Out of curiosity I uninstalled the nvidiadriver and used nouveau : scrolling issues were gone...
( that was an one-time experiment ).

I tried just one more step : Added deb http://hadret.rootnode.net/debian/ unstable main to sources.list and upgraded libcairo2 from version 1.10.2-1.1~bpo60+1 ( squeeze-backports ) to version 1.10.2-6.1. ( http://hadret.rootnode.net/ )
Problem was mostly solved, but I still have some trouble on certain pages. An example this page : http://www.groupon.nl/.
Scrolling gets sticky past the middle of the page....

Next tweak I found out ( scrolling issues disappear ) was to start iceweasel with MOZ_ACCELERATED=1 /usr/bin/iceweasel
Or you can go to the about:config page and set layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true.
If you go to Help > Troubleshooting Information you will see at the bottom of the page :
GPU Accelerated Windows 1/1 OpenGL

With certain themes this tweak will make the tab animation choppy, but you can switch it off by going to the about:config page and set browser.tabs.animate to false.

Get a picasa-like scrolling with : Yet Another Smooth Scrolling.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Alternative Linux software - AlternativeTo.net

AlternativeTo is a new approach to finding good software. Based on our users recommendations we list great alternatives to the applications you want to replace.
Whether you're looking for an alternative to expensive commercial software or just trying to get a feel for what's out there, AlternativeTo is a handy service for finding software alternatives.