Karmic Win pt. 4, Firefox Win

In the last post, we discussed using Rhythmbox media player and integrating with Last.fm.

Karmic Koala installs Firefox 3.5, the newest version, natively. It’s pretty sweet. It runs a lot faster and has two features I really like: bookmark tagging and the ability to pull tabs out and toss them in other Firefox windows. (Google Chrome did this first, and it’s SUCH a handy feature sometimes)

These instructions below mostly apply to 64-bit linux, since in 32-bit linux they’re somewhat trivial. 64-bit is garnering more and more support though, which is awesome.

One feature I had thought to include initially was instructions on synchronizing bookmarks with the UbuntuOne cloud, but I’ll save that for tomorrow when I discuss the cloud in more detail.

So! How does one win with Firefox? Let’s start with some more integration…

Integration with Google Reader

I think Firefox has had this feature for awhile, but I never noticed it until now (I’ve been using Chrome ever since it came out). The bookmarks bar that is directly under the URL bar includes a feature called “Live Bookmarks” that can be tied to RSS feeds.

I use Google Reader to consume my daily news media, and I share articles that I find especially compelling or interesting. Occasionally I’ll share something and then want the URL to send to someone later on. It can be a little tedious to wade back through a few dozen feed posts to find that one you’re looking for.

What you can do, instead, is to grab the RSS feed for your Google Reader shared items (you’ll have to log into your google reader account to find that URL), and pop that into your bookmark bar as a live bookmark. Now, at any point, you can see what you have already shared.

You can also do the same thing with all of your subscription feed, so that you can simply click a button and see if there are any new articles.

Here’s step-by-step instructions for adding your Shared Feed to your bookmark bar.

1. Log onto your Google Reader account.
2. In the left side, under the item called “Your Stuff” (expand it if necessary), select “Shared Items”
3. Click on “Sharing Settings” on the right side (view example)
4. Near the bottom right (you may have to scroll down) click on “Preview your shared items in a new window” (view example)
5. Click on the RSS icon in the URL bar itself (view example) This will bring up the “Smart Feeds” page. Name the feed and you’re good to go!

And… instructions for adding your total feed (with ALL your subscriptions) to the bookmark bar

1. Go back to your Google Reader main page (where you can see all your subscriptions)
2. Click on the RSS icon in the URL bar (view example)

that’s it!

There is one other feature that’s pretty cool, you can get an “Add to Google Reader” button to automatically subscribe any page you are viewing to your Google Reader feed:

1. In Google Reader, click “Settings” in the upper right corner (near where it lists your email address)
2. Click on the “Goodies” tab in this page.
3. Scroll all the way down to “Subscribe as you surf”
4. Click-and-drag the “Subscribe” button up onto your Bookmarks bar.

The “Next” button is neat too — you can click on that and it will navigate you to the next unread item in your subscription feeds, and simultaneously mark that item as read. Nice!

Adobe Flash 64-bit

Without Flash, you won’t be able to watch Autotune the News, Rick Roll, Hulu, or play mindless flash games, etc. Up until a few months ago, there wasn’t any solid 64-bit support for Flash in linux. But Adobe pulled through!

There are two ways you can get it. The easy way is to use the Ubuntu Software Center (formerly “Add/Remove Programs…”) and search for “Flash”. There is an installer for the Adobe Flash Player. It should automatically install the most recent compatible version of the plugin, and you’re good to go.

The other method, slightly more involved, is to download it direct from Adobe Labs. It’s a Gzipped tarball, and you’ll have to do some maneuvering in the filesystem to install it. If the former method doesn’t work, try this one instead.

Google Gears 64-bit

Google Gears is a really cool plugin that allows Firefox to silently download data from supporting websites so that you can use some of their content faster and sometimes even view it offline. (For example, Google Gears can be used with google reader to read your subscriptions offline, or with gMail to read your email offline).

In the past, this too lacked 64bit support, but some innovative fellows have written a mod that successfully loads it in Firefox 3.5. Nice!

The original source is on celogeek.com, but I have mirrored it here. It’s 3MB. You will need to click “Allow” for it to be installed, and Firefox may mistakenly believe it’s 4GB instead of 3MB… don’t sweat it, just wait and it will finish.

Once it’s installed, you’ll need to restart Firefox for it to activate.

To use Gears, you generally need to instruct a website to take advantage of Gears. Here are a few to get you started:

For GMail:

1. Log in to Gmail.
2. Click on the icon found between the Labs icon and “Settings” link. (View example)
3. You will be prompted to enable Gears for gmail. Click Allow.
4. You can customize which message groups (based on labels) are downloaded offline — the default is to only do messages (initially) that are no more than 4 days old. You can customize it a little further, if you wish.

From now on, whenever you open gmail on the web in firefox, it will sync up Gears and you’ll have access to your messages offline. It should slightly improve performance when online too!

For Google Reader:

1. Log in to Google Reader
2. Click on the little green circle next to “Settings” in the upper right
3. Allow it to access Gears
4. When it’s done sync’ing, Click on it again to go back into online mode

You may need to click that green button every now and then because I don’t think it auto-syncs. If you know you’re not going to have Internet for a while (on a plane, for example), you would want to do it beforehand, obviously.

For Google Docs:

1. Log in to Google Documents
2. Click on the little green circle next to “Settings” in the upper right
3. Allow it to access Gears
4. When it’s done sync’ing, Click on it again to go back into online mode

Same suggestion as Reader — the button toggles online/offline mode.

For WordPress:

1. Log into your admin area / dashboard
2. Click on Tools (Bottom of the left-nav)
3. Click “enable gears”
4. Click “allow”

WordPress will autosync — it’s used mostly to cache some of the wordpress system files to speed up your usage. I don’t believe it caches your blog content (ie. you will not be able to work offline, IIRC).

Adding Icons to the Desktop

With Gears, you can use the Google App suite as a quasi-office suite. Create 3 launchers on your Desktop

For each command, use 1 the following:

1. “/usr/bin/firefox” “http://mail.google.com/mail/”
2. “/usr/bin/firefox” “http://docs.google.com/”
3. “/usr/bin/firefox” “http://reader.google.com/”

You can use these images (download them first, obviously) for the icons for those Launchers.

To change the icon for the Launcher, first right click on it, then click “Properties”. While the properties window is displayed, drag the icon file onto the existing Icon in the Properties window. The existing icon should highlight a square around it — drop the new icon there and it should replace the old icon.

I *think* you have to keep those images somewhere, instead of deleting them when done. I keep an “icons” folder under my ~/Pictures/ folder specifically for images like these.

Up next…

Using the new UbuntuOne cloud service.