Firefox Crashing No-more!
Mozilla Firefox is my browser of choice. It has been the best browser for years, until new and old competitors court up. Google and Opera have been hot on the heals of Mozilla, with lighting fast and feature packed browsers. I will hopefully be doing a article about why I use Firefox over the rest shortly. Mozilla is now having to play catch up.
There is only one feature I like about the nearest competitor, Chrome, and that is 'Every tab is it's own process'. If a tab crashes, it doesn't crash the browser. Mozilla is hoping to solve this issue in Firefox 4. In the meantime, they have gone
Adobe Flash has crashed again! (click to enlarge)
half way with plugin crash protection. Plugins such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight is run in its own process, separate from Firefox. If the plugin crashes, it wont crash Firefox. You just need to reload the page to try again. Apparently, 90% of Firefox's crashes is down to the plugin. This new feature was added in a small update, 3.6.4, which is usually reserved for security and stability updates, rather than new features. Find more info here.
SMART HDD & Utility
For many years, computer hard disc drives have had a much forgotten feature which could save you from data lost. SMART is a technology which will find on all hard drives since the 1990s. It monitors various variables on the hard drive and works out when the hard drive is likely to fail, thus saving you from data lost.
Although many hard drives use SMART, this technology is no use to the majority of computer users. In order for the hard drive to tell the user that the hard drive may fail is with the use of a utility program on the computer. Windows does not currently have a utility which will tell the user SMART information. Both Mac OS X and Linux have utilities to let the user know if the hard drive will fail.
Mac OS X has a tool called Disk Utility which will allow you to manage all your drives on your Mac, as well as view the SMART information on each drive.
Since Ubuntu 9.10, there has been a similar tool pre-installed. Palimpsest Disk Utility does a similar job, allowing you to view information about each drive, format/partition it, perform benchmarks on it and view the SMART data. It will even run in the background, and give you a notification as soon as an error has been found on a drive.
Disk Utility in Ubuntu 10.04 (click to enlarge)
Detailed Hardware Info of your Ubuntu box
Just a quick post. Found a great terminal command which will give you a detailed list of the hardware in your Ubuntu computer, it will likely work with other Linux distros as well.
lshw -html > hardware.html
Its best to run it as root/sudo to get more information on your hardware.
Here are my specs, if anyone is interested.
Lexmark Z600 Linux Support
Hardware is general very good in Linux. More often than not, all you have to do is plug in a piece of hardware and it will work out of the box (no drivers necessary!). Sadly, there are occasions when hardware fails to work in Linux, usually printers.
Lexmark is probably the worst at this, getting your Lexmark printer working on Linux can be near impossible. Luckily, the popular home-use Z600 series seems to have fairly good support, thanks a driver supplied by Lexmark and Ubuntu community. This development has been fairly recent, when I joined Ubuntu in 2007, my Z640 was the only piece of hardware I could not get to work.
First you will need to download and install 'libstdc++5', if you have Ubuntu 9.04 or below, it will be in the repos. Ubuntu 9.10 users and above, will have to download it from here!
Next, you need to download the driver from here! It is in a nice DEB file, for easy install 
Set your printer up with Ubuntu, and it will now work perfectly!
Video Playback on GPU in Linux!
One of the major new advancements in nVidia drivers has been the ability to playback video on the GPU instead of the CPU. This is freeing up CPU usage, and putting all the work on the powerful GPUs. However, one of the major problems is getting the correct software to do the job.
In Linux, it appears that there is only one media player which fully supports VDPAU, which is the Linux API developed by nVidia which decodes video on the GPU. Gnome MPlayer supports this technology, which allows both 720p and 1080p video to play on the GPU, without the CPU usage going too high. This technology has allowed me to play HD videos on my Acer Aspire Revo, which if you tried to play on Totem (which renders video on the CPU), the CPU hits 100% and the video very choppy. In Gnome MPlayer, it can playback without a problem with the CPU sitting at 20%.
This is a plea to Gnome to implement VDPAU into Totem!
CCleaner, The Tool which all Windows users need!
CCleaner is a tool I always install Windows, and use regularly to make sure my machine is running quick and is clean.
It basically removes unused temporary files, logs, application data cache data and junk files. It has support for many applications, such as; All major web browsers, Office, Windows files, Flash, VLC, MSN, AntiVir, and the list goes on.
Apart from cleaning old files, it has an excellent tool for finding unused registry entries from old application left there after they were removed. Word of warning, it could always been dangerous changing things in the Windows registry, but I have never had an issue using this tool.
CCleaner is also an excellent tool for removing software and managing which software starts on boot up, a far better solution than what Windows is offering.
There are many solutions like CCleaner, but most of them cause damage to your system and slow it down, basically Junk-Ware! CCleaner gets the job done, always being updated to support more applications, and will improve your system's performance. On your first clean up, it will likely find over 2GBs of junk data!
CCleaner can be downloaded for free here!
CCleaner is a freeware system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool
Windows Apps I Always Install
Want to show Windows love today by posting a short article about the Windows applications I install after a fresh install of Windows. All these apps are free to download and use!
Firefox
The first app I install, Firefox is world's most popular alternative browser. I love this browser for its look and feel, speed, addons and tons of features!
Foxit Reader
Foxit is a PDF reader you might have never heard of. Most people will use Adobe's PDF reader, since thats the one most people only know about. I hate Adobe's PDF reader, it has loads of great features, but it is very slow and heavy on system resources. Foxit Reader is designed to lightweight, very quick to load, and just provide the features to view the PDF document.
OpenOffice.org
Microsoft Office is an excellent set of applications, however it can very expensive to buy. If you need an office suite, OpenOffice.org is a free office suite which is very similar to Microsoft Office. It has a word processer, spreadsheet, presentation, database and drawing. Plus, OpenOffice.org can open Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. OpenOffice has about 90% of the features which Microsoft Office has, and I believe the interface in OpenOffice is better.
VLC
VLC is a media player, and I love it, just because it will play any audio and video file format you throw at it!
CCleaner
Windows computers can get full of junk files, old applications and a messy register. CCleaner is an excellent tool for removing junk and cached files, which can save you 100s of MBs of data. It can safely clean out your registry, which can become messy over time. It is also a very good tool at uninstalling applications and managing the startup of applications in the background.
Pidgin
If you need a lightweight Instant Messenger (IM) client which can handle multiple IM accounts in one application, Pidgin is for you. There is no need to have MSN messenger for your MSN contacts and Yahoo Messenger for your Yahoo contacts, etc; you can have all your contacts in one application! It supports over 20 accounts from different providers. Plus it has great features such as tabbed chat windows, video/audio chat and file transfer.
GIMP
Adobe Photoshop is the hallmark in photo editing, however it is incredible expensive. If you need a photo/graphic editor for free, with the majority of the same features as Photoshop, GIMP is what you need!
Clean up Ubuntu!
As you all may know, I love tweaking and clean up my computers. I have already told you about a tool for Ubuntu, Bleachbit, which removes old files. Now its time to remove unnecessary packages from Ubuntu.
First, install two packages; localepurge and deborphan, both can be found in the Ubuntu repos.
Now we are ready to begin!
Getting rid of Residual Config packages
In Synaptic, on the far left hand side, you may see a category called "Residual config". Click on it, remove all the packages in that section. These are all the old packages which you had installed, which have left parts of the old package behind, this will now clean it up.
Getting rid of partial packages
In the terminal type:
sudo apt-get autoclean
This will remove partially completed packages, which I not needed.
Getting rid of unnecessary locale data
You have justed installed localepurge, this will run everytime you install or remove packages from Ubuntu. It will make sure there are no unused locale files or man pages left on your computer after the package was removed. You dont need to worry about this tool, it will work all by itself.
Getting rid of orphaned packages
In the terminal run this command:
sudo deborphan | xargs sudo apt-get -y remove --purge
When you remove an application from your computer, it may leave behind alot of unnecessary libs and other tools for that application to run. These are not needed now, this command will make sure there are no unused packages.
Thats it! Your computer should have more space free now! A more cleaner and slim-lined computer. Make sure you run these commands every so often, so your computer is always clean!
Install all your apps at once with Ninite!
Got a new computer? Installed Windows 7 for the first time? Reinstalled Windows? Need all your apps downloaded and installed easily and quickly? All you need is Ninite!
Select the applications you want to install from the list (such as Firefox, iTunes, Pidgin, AntiVir, OpenOffice, Flash, etc), download the Ninite tool and Ninite will download and install the latest version of the software you want!
Get Your Apps Fast!
Speed up OpenOffice!
OpenOffice is brilliant, a fully featured office suite, which is like Microsoft Office, but free!
My only issue with Open Office is that it is slow to start up. Here are a few quick tips to speed up Open Office.
In OpenOffice, click Tools > Options > Memory. Change the following:
- Number of Steps - 20
- Use for OpenOffice.org - 128
- Memory per object - 20
- Number of Objects - 2
- Check OpenOffice.org Quickstarter
Then under Java:
- uncheck Use a Java runtime environment
Click OK, and your done! OpenOffice should startup alot quicker!
Me!
Ed Hewitt, 19, Studying @ Derby Uni, Blogger, Ubuntu user, Columnist & Podcaster for FCM, Gamer, Admin on Gfire.- Spotify is saved. Usa by the end of the year!
- Back home from work. 2:30am, time for IT crowd!
- Half way through my shift. Time for a double expesso.
