Now this is forever

There are still a few problems with Hardy Heron and some of the applications that are provided.

1. Even after installing the restricted Nvidia legacy drivers for the TNT2, 1024x768 was not an option in System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution. Further, only 60Hz was available for the refresh rate. The legacy drivers got me 800x600 though.

In the Monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf I added HorizSync and VertRefresh to specify the correct ranges for a 17" MGC 770C CRT. I did CTRL+ALT+Backspace to see the changes but that did nothing to help the situation.

I then added a Display subsection to the Screen section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf to specify "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480". That works, but it forces the monitor to use an 85Hz refresh rate and causes 50Hz, 53Hz, 54Hz and 55Hz to be the only options in System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution for the refresh rate.

This is what I have:

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
        Option          "DPMS"
        HorizSync       30-70
        VertRefresh     50-120
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
        Defaultdepth    24
        Option          "AddARGBGLXVisuals"     "True"
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth   24
                Modes   "1024x768_75.00" "1024x768" "800x600_75.00" "800x600" "640x480_75 "640x480"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

That allows me to get 1024x768 with an 85Hz refresh rate, but not 75Hz.

Not sure how to get the correct list of refresh rates and be able to use them. I even tried "1024x768_75" in the display subsection for example, but it didn't help.

Further, before I installed the Nvidia legacy driver and made 1024x768 available, I was stuck at 640x480. This was bad because whenever a dialog popped up, I couldn't see the buttons because they were off screen and left-click + dragging didn't help. Luckily, I knew that I could hold down alt while dragging to workaround that.

2. Even though the Audigy sound card is detected, you don't get any sound by default. You have to have ESP to know that you need to load alsamixer in the terminal, move over to the analog/digital output jack toggle and press m to turn it off. Then sound works fine. (On Kubuntu this is worse because Kmix resets it on you all the time unless you edit Kmix's options.)

3. Every version of ubuntu I try has keyboard input problems. For example, if I'm typing along in an editor or the terminal, all of sudden, a character that I press will keep repeating all by itself. Same type of thing happens when scrolling with the arrow keys in a browser. All of a sudden, it'll start autoscrolling. This page basically describes the problem.

4. When clicking on a .deb file, no installer program opens up to install the program. I have to open up a terminal and use dpkg -i.

5. When clicking on an .rpm file, no installer program opens up to automatically convert to .deb and install the program. Instead, I have to manually install alien, convert and then use dpkg.

6. If you hit the backspace at the beginning of a line in the terminal, it makes the annoying system beep sound.

7. If an application freezes or is just busy for a few seconds, the whole window turns gray. I find this very very annoying because an application's window can turn gray and back to normal really quick and it can do it a lot. It's totally disruptive. Also, when this happens, if the flash plugin for example causes the gray, when the window comes back to normal, the flash plugin object will be gone and you have to refresh the page. When Firefox's "install missing plugins" service installs a plugin, it causes the gray also.

To fix these last two, I had to install the "Advanced Desktop Effects settings" ("sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager" I think) to turn off the System beep and to change the ping time setting so the gray doesn't happen as much. But, I didn't even know that's what I had to do until I got lucky searching google.

8. I couldn't find anything to clear the clipboard. I searched around and found that I should install glipper. The install appeared to go successfully, but there was no glipper anywhere, not even when trying to execute it on the command line. I installed Klipper instead and that works fine.

9. Firefox 3 beta 5 seems a lot slower compared to the windows version of 3 beta 5. Opera is super fast on Ubuntu though.

10. When I went to youtube in Firefox, it presented me with options for a flash plugin. I forget all the options it gave me, but one of them was swfdec (it was the first in the list). I chose that (mainly because I wanted to try it out). It installed and as a bonus, mp3 and wmv support etc. was installed along with it. Unfortunately, swfdec is horrible. It freezes Firefox and when it doesn't freeze, the audio is so so crackly. So, I installed the Adobe flash player plugin, but there was no way to get Firefox to to use it. Firefox kept on using the swfdec plugin. So, I used apt-get to remove swfdec-mozilla and manually cleaned up the leftover files in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins and /usr/lib/firefox/plugins. Then, the Adobe flash player plugin worked fine.

11. Playing 181.fm streams with the Totem player works great. But, even if you have the playlist to set to repeat, when the server drops the connection, the player just throws up an error dialog and waits for the user to click ok or something. So, I tried Rythymbox music player to play the streams. This worked fine for a bit, but it stops downloading the stream after awhile and reconnecting doesn't do anything. I gave up on that and installed Amarok. It works a lot better, but foobar on windows works perfectly in this area.

12. Video (flash plugin and in Totem) is very choppy and goes out of sync with the audio sometimes. On windows this isn't really a problem. You can't scroll, move the mouse or do anything while a video is playing or the audio will get even worse.

13. I like to use videolan and consider it a pretty important app (Videolan has better performance when playing videos and DVDs). But, it'd be nice if I didn't have to search for the universe repository URI and add it before trying to install.

14. Gedit is really slow at reading big files.

15. The Show desktop button fails to minimize all windows sometimes.

16. Getting Firefox to recognize sun java is a pain. Creating a symlink to libjavaplugin_oji.so is easy, but it doesn't help (this worked fine in the past). The only way I'm able to get Java to work is to use the "install missing plugins" option in Firefox to install sun java. In Opera, I can just set the java directory in preferences and be done with it.

17. I installed Wine. Notepad++ installs and works fine. I installed Safari also, but it's not stable under wine. Also, last time I checked, building win32 executables with mingw under wine didn't work. I'll have to try that again though.

18. When you empty trash in Nautilus, sometimes it doesn't refresh afterwards, which makes it look like nothing was deleted.

19. The update manager freezes when I click "check" and I have to kill it.

20. I tried Kubuntu with KDE4. What a mess!

21. Compared to windows, by default, there's not as much screen space. There's so much stuff on the top and bottom panels that trying to fit everything all on one panel and turning off the other bar isn't any fun.

Some of this stuff is just nitpicking, but having to *still* manually configure my video card and having sound secretely muted by default is horrible. The keyboard bug is a major problem also, but luckily, it doesn't happen all the time. I still hope they fix it though. The gray overlay for busy apps must not be on by default.

Now, here are some good things:

1. It recognized my usb printer.

2. It recognized my cable modem that's hooked up via usb. (This suprised me!).

3. In general, I could manage to use only Ubuntu just fine if there wasn't anything on Windows I needed to test.

4. Opera works wonderfully on Ubuntu.

In Firefox:

1. Goto tools -> options -> tabs.
2. Make sure "always show the tab bar" is enabled.
3. Now, make sure you have only one tab open and make sure it's blank.
4. Type something in the address field (but don't press enter).
5. Click the X on the tab, or right-click on the tab and click "close tab", or middle-click on the tab etc.

Firefox will basically close the tab and open a new one, which will give you a nice, blank address field. (It may just clear the address field in this case for efficiency, but the technicality is not important.)

Now, try the same thing in IE7 and Safari ...

Oops, there's no close option for the tab, even if you have a page loaded in it.

Now, in Opera:

1. Goto tools -> preferences -> advanced -> tabs.
2. Make sure "allow window with no tabs" is unchecked.
3. Make sure "Click on tab to minimize" is checked.
4. Make sure "Show close button on each tab" is checked.

and try the same ...

Oops, the same thing as IE and Safari. The close functions are disabled for the tab (unless you loaded a page in it, then it works like Firefox).

Now, I can guess why IE, Safari and Opera do what they do. Technically, if you're not allowed to have a window with no tabs, it doesn't make sense to have a close function when you only have one tab. Also, technically, if you want to go to a site in the current tab, you'd clear the address field, type in the URI and press enter or click GO etc. (or click in the address field, which selects all the text and start typing). In short, Firefox's way doesn't technically make sense.

However, the reality is, Firefox's way of providing a close function and having it clear the tab is totally awesome. It may not make sense, but it's better than what the others do. It's much more pleasant to start typing in an empty tab and using the close function to clear the tab this way is so convenient, cool, exciting and fun.

I think this is a case of IE, Safari and Opera trying to make too much sense.

Luckily, there's hope for Opera. As mentioned above, if the tab isn't blank, then you can indeed use a close function to clear the tab like Firefox. Even better, turn off "show close button on each tab". That will give you an MDI X button near the top right of the window. This close button will clear the tab just like Firefox (even if the tab is totally blank).

On a side note, the MDI X button has other special powers. If the regular close functions fail to close a page (because the page is freezing up and messing with Opera's UI), click the MDI X button. It'll zap the tab for you and save you from having to kill Opera.

With the release of Opera 9.50 Alpha1 comes some mailto URI fixes that have been needed for a long time.

• "Copy email address" now works right. It properly gathers all non-empty TO addresses and copies them to the clipboard as a decoded, comma-separated list of addresses. Before, it behaved *something* like "Copy link address" where you would just get part of the encoded URI. Note that Firefox will only grab the first TO address when copying, but there's a patch in Mozilla Bug 353102 for that to work like Opera.
  
  
• If there's more than one subject hvalue in the mailto URI, only the last one is used when filling in the subject field in the compose window. This is how Thunderbird does it also.
  
  
• hvalues are now decoded properly. It's no longer needed to double-encode your URIs to get Opera to decode them properly. Also %0D, %0A, others, and %HH sequences representing unicode characters are now decoded properly. (On a side, Kestrel comes with some javascript URI decoding fixes also.)
  
  
• Previously, if there were multiple body hvalues in the mailto URI, they would be joined with %0D%0A. This is still true, but now it looks right because of the decoding fixes. However, there is a regression where all empty body hvalues (after the first non-empty one) are now skipped, which causes Opera to be different than Thunderbird just a bit, but this is an edge case anyway and has been reported.
  
  
• Actually first seen in Merlin, but worth mentioning, Opera now skips empty TO, CC and BCC hvalues so you don't get a comma and a space in the compose field for each empty hvalue.
  
  
• If you enter a raw mailto URI in the address field and use backslashes (as in "Tim \"The Toolman\" Taylor" <tim's email address>), the backslashes will no longer be converted to frontslashes on you.
  
  
• Previously, if Opera was the default mail client and was already open (dde issue), launching a mailto link in another app would just cause Opera's window to focus and no compose window to open. This is now fixed.
  
  
• Previously, 'mailto:' would not trigger a compose window. It had to be 'mailto:something'. Now, it's fixed to launch a compose window.
  
  
• Previously, if Opera was the default mail client and Opera was closed, launching a mailto link in another app would open Opera and open a compose window, but multiple blank tabs would open also. This is fixed now so that the blank tab is automatically closed. This has the side-effect of the tab closing on you if you manually enter a mailto URI in a blank tab. However, just lock the tab first if you're testing and want it to remain open.
  
  
• Previously, the Opera mailto protocol registry keys on windows had the wrong dde values. This is fixed now.
  
  
• Previously, the body field of the compose window would have extra lines even when you didn't have a signature set. This is fixed now.
  

To really get an idea of how much things have been fixed, try this mailto link test.

In Opera, with the mailto protocol set to "Open with Opera" try the mailto link in both Kestrel and Merlin. You will see how much things have improved with mailto URI parsing. Also try "Copy email address" on the link. Pretty nice.

Try those same tests in Firefox with Thunderbird 3.0 (3.0 because it has the fix for Bug 320206) set as the default mail client. You'll see just how close Opera and Thunderbird are. (I don't mention any other email clients, because Opera and Thunderbird are the only ones that can parse mailto URIs this well (which is beyond the old and not-specific-enough RFC2368).

There are still more mailto-related things to fix in Opera, but it's looking sharp.

As a bonus of messing with this mailto link stuff, here's a Webmail compose Opera userjs script that parses mailto links like Thunderbird and Opera. By default, it's set up for Gmail, but the script includes composes URIs for operamail. squirrelmail and yahoo webmail. Try it with the test on the page linked above.

After having a bunch of trouble (missing ml.exe, missing manifests, missing dlls, broken spellcheck) building Thunderbird 2.0b2 (to add in a trivial fix for bcc hname parsing in mailto URIs), I found a simple way to build Thunderbird. Grab the latest and greatest off the trunk instead.

Set up the build enviroment

• Install Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
  
• Install the Windows Platform SDK.
  
• Install MASM
  
• Install the MozillaBuild tools to the default directory of "c:\mozilla-build".
  
• Copy msvcm80.dll, msvcp80.dll and msvcr80.dll from the "%windir$\WinSxS\x86_Microsoft.VC80.CRT..." directory to "%windir%\system32".
  

Get the source:

• Double-left-click on "c:\mozilla-build\start-msvc8.bat".
  
• Enter "cd c:"
  
• Enter "cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot co mozilla/client.mk"
  
• Enter "cd mozilla"
  
• Check the Thunderbird trunk status before continuing.
  
• Enter "make -f client.mk checkout MOZ_CO_PROJECT=mail" to download the source.
  

Generate the Makefiles

• Enter "./configure --enable-application=mail --enable-static --disable-shared --enable-optimize=-Zc:wchar_t-"
  

Build Thunderbird

• Enter "make" and sit back while it builds.
  

If you get lucky, it will build successfully and all the Thunderbird executables will be in the "c:\mozilla\dist\bin". You can then copy the content of the folder somewhere and run thunderbird.exe.

There are some extra steps involved in setting up the version information, branding, the installer and adding the redistributable runtime dlls and manifest, but haven't went there. (I disabled updates in Thunderbird though just in case the update checker thinks the build is old.)

Building process
Having access to the Thunderbird source so I can fix things (the fix worked btw) is really cool. However, building it is still a pain (much easier than building gaim and all its dependencies in Debian woody though). It's not automated enough and build instructions are even more vague than the above. Of course, Thunderbird is a beast.

I'm also not too happy about the dependency on Microsoft's compiler for Win32 builds. I'd really like to be able to *just as easily* use Mingw (plus MSYS for ./configure) to build Thunderbird, but oh well.

I also got a broken pipe cvs error. I didn't realize that I could ignore it at first, so I kept redownloading the source. Turns out, the error happens after everything is downloaded and it can be ignored.