Because of the netbook craze or just because you like seeing more of the web and less of the application it takes to view it, one might want to minimize the usage of screen space taken up by various firefox functions. Below are several tips for accomplishing this.
When you Ctrl+K to the Google search box in Firefox, type your terms and hit Enter, the results appear in your current tab – but it’s easy to make ‘em open a whole new tab so you don’t lose your current page.
Type about:config into the address bar, and then put the following into the filter box: browser.search.openintab. Double-click the value to change it to true.
You can also use Alt-Enter when you search to open a new tab optionally. Want more Firefox about:config magic?
Say you need a backup list of every package installed on your Arch system. This should be simple enough:
pacman -Qe > intalled_apps.txt
Lets say you’re setting up a new box, or blew away your installation and want to go back just to the way things were. Well save this file, and once you’ve gone through the initial Arch install simply run
for x in $(cat install_apps.txt); do pacman -S $x; done
The problem:
running the following:
$: /usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox
gives you this following:
$: /usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox
/usr/bin/VirtualBox: line 1: /usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox: Permission denied.
The reason:
If SuSEconfig runs it resets the permissions of the files defined in /etc/permissions*.
The solution:
sudo chmod o+x /usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox
Open the file > /etc/permissions.easy < with vi, goto the end and change the lines of VirtualBox from permission 4750 to 4755.
Save, Quit.
cw is a non-intrusive real-time ANSI color wrapper for common unix-based commands on GNU/linux. cw is designed to simulate the environment of the commands being executed, so that if a person types ‘du’, ‘df’, ‘ping’, etc. in their shell it will automatically color the output in real-time according to a definition file containing the color format desired. cw has support for wildcard match coloring, tokenized coloring, headers/footers, case scenario coloring, command line dependent definition coloring, and includes over 50 pre-made definition files.
cw works by having an augmented PATH environmental variable which has a path to the cw definition directory prepended to it, this is usually set as “export PATH=/usr/local/lib/cw:$PATH” (in bash). in this cw definition directory you will see file(s) under the very same name of the program they are designed to color. these files appear as the common executable binaries you may be used to using, but they are just text files that contain instructions for cw to use, including the path to the “real” binary
click for larger
source: http://cwrapper.sourceforge.net/
arch aur package: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=29901
Playing with uzbl, I recently created a flat text file of my bookmarks saved in ~/.bookmarks, a bit cumbersome right now, but the good part is uzbl isn’t the only browser who can open links given to it from a dmenu script.
Continue reading ‘dmenu script to open bookmarks in firefox tabs’ »
Like Vimperator for Firefox? Want something a bit smaller? Easier to config from plain text files? Well meet Uzbl. Uzbl follows the UNIX philosophy – “Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.”
Now while this all good and dandy, even with a tiling window manager, I find most WMs bad at managing many open web pages and find that more suitable for tabs within the browser, fortunate others do too and have written uzbl_tabbed.py.
This python application is a shell that is able to open and contain multiple uzbl instances in the one window using a gtk.Notebook widget essentially giving uzbl tabbing support. The parent application (uzbl_tabbed.py) uses a FIFO socket to receive commands from child uzbl instances to execute various functions in the parent application like creating a new tab, opening a tab from the clipboard, going to the next tab, closeing tab number 5, etc in the same way you normally control uzbl through its FIFO socket. There is nothing stopping you from sending commands to uzbl_tabbed.py’s socket and performing those same actions yourself either manually or automatically.
Upon start-up the uzbl_tabbed.py script reads the users uzbl config file (found at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/uzbl/config) for any commands it is able to inherit and or load that relate specifically to uzbl_tabbed.py. After spawning a uzbl instance the parent communicates to its new child uzbl instance through its socket the bind commands that (you are able to define/change either in the application itself or in your uzbl config file) give you the ability to control uzbl_tabbed.py as you would any other external script. Remembering that uzbl_tabbed.py doesn’t listen or catch ANY keys pressed by the user but rather relies entirely from commands it binds to each child to navigate to the next tab, open new tabs, close tabs, etc.
Screenshot:
click for larger
Continue reading ‘uzbl and uzbl_tabbed.py: a browser that adheres to the unix philosophy’ »
Brisbin, a regular over at the Arch linux forums has come up with a nifty little script for mpd called Goodsong. It is for people who like to play their entire music collection on shuffle via mpd. Occasionally,people like us all into a valley of bad music and end up hitting next far too much to get to a good song. For this reason he wrote goodsong.
Continue reading ‘Goodsong, a script for mpd to rate songs as “good”’ »
The pacman cache is a folder containing compressed packages that you’ve downloaded – including older versions, e.g. you’ll have somepackage.0.1.1, somepackage.0.1.2 and somepackage.0.1.3, etc It can be very useful if something breaks and you need to revert to an earlier package. But it also takes up a lot of space! I was able for free up about 4GB of space on my box by doing this:
pacman -Sc This clears outdated/uninstalled packages.
I got another 1GB freed by running
pacman -Scc This clears the whole folder, not just the packages that are outdated/uninstalled.
Optimise the pacman database (good to do from time-to-time!)
pacman-optimize && sync
This will attempt to put all the small files together in one (physical) location on the hard disk so that the hard disk head does not have to move so much when accessing all the packages.
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Improve_Pacman_Performance
