Offmessage

Just upgraded to SqueezeCenter 7.2 at home (having previously been on the 6.x Debian package).  The improvements are fantastic, except… In Firefox 2 on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) my CPU got pegged for a couple of seconds every time a new page loaded, making the interface unusably slow.

I’ve fixed it by disabling the “Ubuntu Firefox Modifications 0.5″ FireFox Add-on, but I can’t find much information about what that extension does and what I’m missing by disabling it. Or why on earth it breaks it in the first place.

Now it’s time for a Boom

Never never ever ever alter your apt-sources.list to a new distribution and then sudo aptitude update; sudo aptitude upgrade. The smart among you will have noticed the *upgrade* rather than *dist-upgrade*. It really really breaks your computer. To the point of needing a reinstall. Which, given it was the laptop that I had such trouble installing the first place is a real pain in the arse.

Just don’t do it kids.

Part of the problem (that’s perhaps a little unfair, but hey, bear with me) of an automatically updated Kubuntu desktop is that sometimes the defaults change, and you end up with a change that you aren’t happy with. Recently, and for no reason I could divine, the default viewer for PDFs in Thunderbird (mail client) changed to evince. This should, of course, be fine, but for yet more reasons I can’t divine evince can’t print. Or rather, can only occasionally print, which is frankly worse.

After about a month of muttering to myself I finally broke and tried to find out what the hell was going on… It’s not defined in the Attachments menu (in Thunderbird Edit -> Preferences -> Attachments -> View & edit actions). It’s not defined in the system Default Applications (from the ’start’ button System Settings -> Default Applications). It’s not even defined using update-alternatives. Instead (and thanks to Tim Fredrick’s site for pointing me in the right direction) it’s defined in /usr/share/applications/defaults.list. In that file look for the line starting application/pdf and change the value to be the .desktop file of your choice, relative to the /usr/share/applications directory. In my case my app of choice is KPDF, and so I have changed my line to read as follows:

application/pdf=kde/kpdf.desktop

Sorted.

Ouch for Microsoft, at least. Dell gives the go ahead for Linux.

So… I’m using Kubuntu, but instead of every URL opening in Konqueror I want them to open in Firefox… The Debian way is to use the update-alternatives command (update-alternatives --config x-www-browser), but for some reason this doesn’t affect Kopete… Everything else opens URLs nicely in Firefox, but Kopete stubbornly continues to fire up Konqueror. Turns out that in System Settings -> KDE Components you can set the default browser there too, and lo! now Kopete opens links in FF as it should. Marvellous.