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Development

Firefox Extension Issues

By Forrest Cook
October 31, 2007

The Firefox 2 web browser is undoubtedly one of the most important applications running on the Linux desktop. Your author has been running Firefox for many years now. It is generally user friendly, the features that it has are useful, normally it doesn't get in the way of the user and crashes are rare. The Linux desktop would clearly not be the same without it.

One exception to this generally happy situation involves the handling of non-standard audio and video formats. Take, for example, the extremely common mp3 audio format. For reference, we'll be working with the Firefox version 2.0.0.8 on Ubuntu 7.10, both current releases. Firefox on Ubuntu is set up to use Totem, a GNOME movie player for playing mp3 files. Unfortunately, across quite a few releases of Ubuntu, your author has never had any luck getting Totem to play an mp3 file, clicking on an mp3 link causes Totem to fire up, then it simply freezes.

If you don't mind having a bit of closed-source software on your machine, RealPlayer 10 is a basic mp3 player with a simple GUI control panel that can be connected to Firefox. Here's how the installation was performed: the RealPlayer10GOLD.bin file was downloaded to a user directory, the downloaded file was executed, then the realplay command was executed manually in order to answer the installation and license questions. The libstdc++5 package had to be installed for realplay to run. Once realplay was initialized, things got more complicated. It was necessary to become root, visit the /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/ directory, remove the default libtotem files and restart Firefox. Downloading an mp3 file caused Firefox to display a popup window that prompted the user to select an appropriate player. The appropriate player was selected and things now worked. This process is easy the second time around, but a lot of digging through documentation was required initially.

Now, lets say you want to watch a new Hot Tuna video on You Tube. This case is a bit easier than setting Firefox up to play mp3 files. You Tube directed the browser to the Adobe Flash Player Download Center. The software was downloaded, unzipped and extracted with tar. The flashplayer-installer command was executed and it put a copy of libflashplayer.so in the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory, the plugins directory may require manual creation. Firefox was restarted and Hot Tuna played.

Another example of a common browser plugin is Java. It can be interesting to look at weather radar on the US NEXRAD network. If you click on the Loop buttons, Firefox will tell you that it needs to have Java installed. Unlike older versions, this version of Firefox/Ubuntu brought up a menu for choosing Sun's Java or GCJ. GCJ was chosen and seemed to install correctly, but was not able to display the radar movie. Once installed, removal of the faulty GCJ became a mystery. Installing the Sun Java manually seemed to overwrite the correct links, although the GCJ files are still sitting on the system in some unknown location, taking up disk space. The new magic only seems to work the first time Java needs to be installed.

The Java software was found on the Sun Microsystems Download Center for Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment 6 Update 3. Java was downloaded and the jre-6u3-linux-i586.bin file was executed. The installation/license questions had to be answered and the software was installed. Again, it was necessary to go to the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory and make a symbolic link back to the installed jre/jre1.6.0_03/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so file. Not something your grandmother would want to do. Firefox was restarted and the radar movies work.

These examples may not be the most optimal solutions, but they were effective for achieving the desired results. To get the above three plugins running, it was necessary to modify either the system-wide or user-specific plugin directories. In one case, symbolic links were used to point to the installed libraries, in another case the library was copied directly. There does not seem to be any kind of standard technique in use.

Firefox has an internal about:plugins URL to display the plugin list. On one test machine, the plugin list was missing any entry for realplayer, but the player was installed and functioning. Unlike the about:config URL, there is no way to modify anything shown in about:plugins.

It seems like the adding of plugins should be possible using the Firefox menus. Clicking on Edit->Preferences->Content->File Types [Manage] brings up the Download Actions window, but that window seems to be crippled. There is no "Add" button, only a "Change Action" button that works on a limited number of pre-defined file extensions. There is no MP3 or JAVA extension to be found. Again, the list of plugins does not show everything installed.

Some of the plugin confusion is likely the result of different methods used by the various plugin software writers. However, that is likely caused by having too many ways to do one thing. This section of Firefox really looks like it could use a code review. Some work on simplifying the interface and the addition of some basic features would go a long way toward improving the end user experience. Managing plugins under Firefox really should be a lot easier to do.

Comments (24 posted)

System Applications

Database Software

PostgreSQL 8.3 Beta 2 released

Version 8.3 Beta 2 of the PostgreSQL DBMS has been announced. "Our first two weeks of testing were extremely fruitful, finding several bugs in Beta 1, which we've now fixed and are ready for you to re-test version 8.3. If you weren't able to get Beta 1 working on your system, it should be working now ... so try it out and tell us what you find!"

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SQuirreL SQL Client version 2.6.1 released (SourceForge)

Version 2.6.1 of SQuirreL SQL Client is available with several important bug fixes. "SQuirreL SQL Client is a graphical SQL client written in Java that will allow you to view the structure of a JDBC compliant database, browse the data in tables, issue SQL commands etc."

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Setting Up Master-Master Replication With MySQL 5 On Debian Etch (HowtoForge)

HowtoForge presents a tutorial on MySQL 5 Master-Master replication. "Since version 5, MySQL comes with built-in support for master-master replication, solving the problem that can happen with self-generated keys. In former MySQL versions, the problem with master-master replication was that conflicts arose immediately if node A and node B both inserted an auto-incrementing key on the same table. The advantages of master-master replication over the traditional master-slave replication are that you don't have to modify your applications to make write accesses only to the master, and that it is easier to provide high-availability because if the master fails, you still have the other master."

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Postgres Weekly News

The October 28, 2007 edition of the Postgres Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.

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Web Site Development

Django security fix released

A security fix release of the Django web platform has been announced. "Today we're releasing a fix for a security vulnerability discovered in Django's internationalization framework. The complete details are below, but the executive summary is that you should updated to a fixed version of Django immediately."

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Desktop Applications

Business Applications

opentaps 1.0.0-Preview6 released (SourceForge)

Version 1.0.0-Preview6 of opentaps has been announced. Opentaps is an: "ERP and CRM suite, including eCommerce, inventory, warehouse, order, customer management, general ledger, MRP, POS. Database independent service-oriented architecture (SOA). The opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM application suite released version 1.0.0 Preview 6 today. There have been over 500 commits since the release of Preview 6 at the end of September."

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Data Visualization

PLplot release 5.8.0-RC1

Release 5.8.0-RC1 of PLplot, a scientific plotting library, has been announced. "This is a release candidate 1 for a stable release of PLplot. It represents the ongoing efforts of the community to improve the PLplot plotting package. Development releases in the 5.9.x series will be available every few months. The next full release will be 5.10.0."

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Desktop Environments

GNOME Software Announcements

The following new GNOME software has been announced this week: You can find more new GNOME software releases at gnomefiles.org.

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KDE 4.0 Beta 4 and Development Platform RC1 Released

The KDE project has announced the releases of the fourth KDE 4.0 beta and the first development platform release candidate. The project is strongly interested in more feedback from testers so that the final 4.0 release can be as solid as possible.

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KDE Commit-Digest for 28th October 2007 (KDE.News)

The October 28, 2007 edition of the KDE Commit-Digest has been announced. The content summary says: "Further XMP tag support in Digikam. Beginnings of a Plasma lock/logout applet and a weather applet, to display data from the existing weather data engine. Continued work on the new Plasma-based KNewsTicker applet. Continued work and development ideas in Parley. More various developments and optimisations in KHTML. Jamendo album download support in Amarok 2.0..."

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KDE Software Announcements

The following new KDE software has been announced this week: You can find more new KDE software releases at kde-apps.org.

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Interoperability

Wine 0.9.48 released

Version 0.9.48 of Wine has been announced. "What's new in this release: Still more fixes for regression test failures. Much more complete cryptnet implementation. WIDL is now able to generate the oleaut32 proxy code. Lots of bug fixes."

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Music Applications

a2jmidid version 2 released

Version 2 of a2jmidid has been announced. "a2jmidid is daemon for exposing legacy ALSA sequencer applications in JACK MIDI system. It is based on jack-alsamidi-0.5 (jackd alsa seq midi backend) by Dmitry Baikov. The main purpose is to ease usage of legacy, not JACK-ified apps, in JACK MIDI enabled systems. New in this release is addition of configure script (autotools) that enables compatibility with different JACK MIDI API variants."

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horgand 1.14 released

Version 1.14 of horgand, an organ synthesizer, is out. Changes include: "Hundreds of new presets (Strings, Brass, ... ) availables on the website. Five new waveforms. All the waveforms are available for LFO and DSP effects. Back to ALSA if JACK is not available. Code improved for less CPU usage. Some minor bugs fixed."

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Office Suites

The OpenOffice.org Impress presenter screen

While OpenOffice.org's Impress is a reasonable presentation program, it lacks one often-requested feature: the provision of a separate screen for the presenter which would contain notes, an indication of what the next slide is, etc. So it is encouraging that the OOo developers have just announced that this feature is now in development; see this page for some description of how it is expected to work. "Implementation of the Presenter Screen extension has begun and there is an early extension that shows its basic capabilities. The look, layout, and detailed behaviour of the controls, however, are far from final. This is where you, dear reader, come into play. You can help us develop this extension by giving feedback when you try out the developer snapshot, by telling us what would help you most giving a presentation, or by joining us in implementing it..."

Comments (10 posted)

OpenOffice.org Newsletter

The October, 2007 edition of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter is out with the latest OO.o office suite articles and events.

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Web Browsers

Mozilla Links Newsletter

The October 25, 2007 edition of the Mozilla Links Newsletter is online, take a look for the latest news about the Mozilla browser and related projects.

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Miscellaneous

The beta version of CommonDesktop Infrastructure is released

The first beta release of the CommonDesktop Infrastructure has been announced. "The programs provide the functions which convert protocol of QtDBUS, UNO, and SOAP. So, you can call Qt program from UNO program vice versa. And, you can also call SOAP service from Qt or UNO program. The code generators which generate protocol conversion codes from IDL are included. So, you can use Common Desktop Infrastructure by only writing IDL. In short, you can seamlessly connect KDE4/Qt4, OpenOffice/UNO, and SOAP."

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KnowledgeTree OSS STABLE 3.5 is now available (SourceForge)

Stable version 3.5 of KnowledgeTree, a cross-platform document management system, has been announced. "This release, the first of the 3.5 series, presents some major updates to KnowledgeTree. Some of the highlights are... - KnowledgeTree is now licensed under the GPLv3; - KnowledgeTree has moved to PHP5 and MySQL 5; - A brand new powerful search system has been implemented."

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md5deep version 2.0.1 released (SourceForge)

Version 2.0.1 of md5deep has been announced. The software: "Computes the MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, Tiger, or Whirlpool message digest for any number of files while optionally recursively digging through the directory structure. Can also match input files against lists of known hashes in a variety of formats. I've published version 2.0.1 to fix a compilation bug on older Linux systems. The new code required a newer kernel to work; this version is backwards compatible."

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Languages and Tools

C

GCC 4.3.0 Status Report

The GCC 4.3.0 Status Report has been published. "We're still in Stage 3 for GCC 4.3. As before, I think a reasonable target for creating the release branch is less than 100 open regressions. At present, we're at 184 -- and, of those, 36 are P1."

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Caml

Caml Weekly News

The October 30, 2007 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new Caml language articles.

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Haskell

Haskell Weekly News

The October 25, 2007 edition of the Haskell Weekly News is online. "It has been a huge month for the Haskell community, with the Haskell Workshop, ICFP and CUFP conferences, the second international Haskell Hackathon, and 63 libraries and tools uploaded to hackage! A round of applause to everyone involved!" (Thanks to Don Stewart).

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Lisp

SBCL 1.0.11 has been released

Version 1.0.11 of SBCL has been announced. "Steel Bank Common Lisp 1.0.11 has been released on 25 October 2007. This version adds a semaphore interface, improves stack allocation of lists, removes locking from hash table accessors, and fixes some bugs."

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Perl

Perl 6 Design Meeting Minutes for 24 October 2007 (use Perl)

The minutes from the October 24, 2007 Perl 6 Design Meeting have been published. "The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 24 October 2007. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Will, Jesse, and chromatic attended."

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Python

PyDirectio 1.0.2 announced (SourceForge)

Version 1.0.2 of PyDirectio has been announced. "A Python interface to open/read/write on a direct I/O context. This is an interface to open(), read(), write() and close() on a direct I/O context (O_DIRECT flag) from the Python programming language. For those of you who lurk around Cheeseshop from time to time I am happy to bring you the first updated version of directio for Python on Linux in over a year! This release fixes several major problems with the first public edition so if you are an older edition make sure you update to this newer edition that fixes major bugs!"

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Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links

The October 29, 2007 edition of the Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.

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Tcl/Tk

Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and links

The October 30, 2007 edition of the Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.

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XML

Data Sources as Web Services (XML.com)

Kyle Gabhart introduces WS02 on on O'Reilly's XML.com. "Kyle Gabhart describes WS02's Data Services, a new feature in WS02 that allows for rapid creation of web services wrapping relational, Excel, CSV, and JNDI data sources quickly and easily."

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Version Control

monotone 0.37 released

Version 0.37 of monotone, a version controle system, has been released. "Time for a new, and currently not so regular release. This is version[] 0.37, with quite a number of changes that I imagine would be interesting for quite a lot of people."

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Page editor: Forrest Cook
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