Last night a distro saved my life…

This is how you find out how the open-source economic system works.
My ubuntu 6.10 ‘Edgy Eft’ stalled. I suspected a Firefox memory leak, not a good guess as I had recently upgraded to 2.0.0.1 (and recovered the fox logo, thanks to the mozilla foundation). A quick Google told me that this was not the case, but I suffered from the « upgrade to edgy and hibernate swap uuid problem ». A quick nano /fstab to recover my swap uuid, copy/paste in /etc/instramfs-tools/conf.d/resume, followed by update-inistramfs -u -k $(uname -r) did the trick (well, it’s all described in French ubuntu wiki).
Alas, poor Yorik, my machine refused to restart on reboot.
NO sweat, I rebooted, fschk kicked in, solved a few (!) issues… and made my day !

    Conclusions:

  1. Imagine THAT with another OS…
  2. When they say that some distros are for geek only, it is true. I am lucky to have installed a flavor with plenty of autodetect fs checks at bootup AND a huge userbase which contributes to many forums & howtos
  3. I use Ubuntu since 5.04, after some tries at Knoppix, Easylinux and Debian (yes, in that order). I never gave a dime to anybody (well, free as in beer also…). Because I didn’t feel why I should. This is probably a cultural issue with us multicultural expats, never at ease in our country (another story…). Now I know why I will donate. Donate few, donate often, donate to many. To wikipedia, to ubuntu, to EFF, to whoever gives to the community without expecting the community to give back, but who still has a life to live, kids to feed, house to pay…

How’d I Get Here (Firefox extension)

How’d I Get Here (high)? is a Firefox extension that allows you to go to the page on which you first clicked a link to the current page. say, for example, you want to go « back » even after opening a link in a new tab and closing the original tab, or you want to remember how you found a site you bookmarked yesterday, or better if you are sent a link you have already seen, you can astound the sender by responding with a statement more precise than « I saw that on some blog a few days ago ».

Today’s ff extensions

lget 0.2, a good download manager. See also FlashGot, a manager for third party download managers, with Build Gallery functionality. Also Fasterfox, which allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay; Tab Mix Plus is a continuation of the TBP/TBE idea. It includes duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, … (includes a session manager with crash recovery, so a conflict with session saver .2 can be expected); DownThemAll lets you filter and download all the links contained in any web-page; Distrust hides the « surfing trails » that the browser leaves behind. it monitors FireFox for its activities and will remove history items cache and cookies that were used during the session.

MacWarriors TrailBlazer

MacWarriors TrailBlazer solves the problem of getting back to a web page you’ve been to before, but didn’t have the forethought to bookmark. The current solutions provided by most web browsers, their history menu, is just a list of titles and web addresses which aren’t memorable enough to be useful. Reveal allows you to see thumbnails of pages in your session history and quickly find the page you want.