Switching page tabs using Firefox on Ubuntu

Having more or less switched away from Windows to Ubuntu, I was looking for a way to switch between open page tabs on Firefox 3.0.5, having got used to this feature on Windows in the past.

Thanks to this, I've "discovered" that I can use [Ctrl] + [Tab] to cycle through open tabs from left to right, or [Ctrl] + [PgUp] to move left or [Ctrl] + [PgDn] to move right.

Sweet !

"I'm a Mapple person ... we're all Mapple people"

The Family Simpson enjoy the Mapple experience ...

I want this ... just for the cute kitten

Ubuntu Kung Fu Tips, Tricks, Hints, and Hacks by Keir Thomas

Curses on social networking :-)

Six months ago, I was a complete n00b when it came to social networking - I'd really only set up this blog back in early 2007 as a way of documenting things that I might someday wish to refer back to - and I frequently do look back.

As an example, I installed VMware Workstation 6.5 on Ubuntu earlier today, and referred back to this post to remember how to fix the borked keyboard when running Windows VMware images.

Fast forward to October or November when I joined Facebook after months of gentle encouragement from friends and colleagues including Ray. Then I discovered the completely addictive waste of time that is Twitter, and my "life" went out the window.

Well, today, I'm ashamed to announce that I've found another complete waste of time - Last.FM - and am happily listening to music and artists that I'd almost wiped from my short and longer term memory.

Seriously, life is good, but I can see my (ahem) work-day increasing as I find more things to do that require a network connection.

Now, did someone say that there is an iPod / iPhone application for Last.FM ???

Using Skype on Ubuntu

A few days ago, I struggled to use Skype on Linux to have a conversation with a friend in New Zealand. Before you ask, it wasn't the beer but the audio inputs and outputs on my Thinkpad T60p (2007-AE7).

Today, I re-installed Skype 2.0.0.72 on a clean installation of Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid", and took the time out to document the key points, including how to set up the audio so that I can actually make a call.

Hope this helps.

*UPDATE* And here is the actual document *UPDATE*

Happy New Year, and it's looking good so far .... suspend and resume ARE working on the T60p, really :-)

Following on from previous posts here and here and here, I was still struggling to get suspend and resume to work reliably on the Thinkpad T60p with Intrepid.

Given that this used to work when I first installed Intrepid in early November, I'm assuming that a recent update has broken something e.g. a new kernel or an updated fglrx driver.

I experimented with various drivers including the supported open-source fglrx driver that comes with Intrepid, the radeon / radeonhd drivers, as well as the most recent fglrx driver from the ATI site here.

Sadly nothing seemed to work and I was becoming resigned to having to shut down and boot up each time I went from home to Starbucks to the office to home to Starbucks ....

Symptom-wise, I could suspend without problems, but would find that the display remained dark on resume. Whilst the PC seemed to be working e.g. [CapsLk] light could be toggled on/off, hard disk appeared to spin when I hit various keys etc. I couldn't get the display to return, and ended up using the power button - which is a less than ideal way of shutting down.

After lots of trial and lots of error ( and lots of Google ), I worked out that: -

(a) the problem related to virtual terminals
(b) that the combination of compiz and fglrx was definitely the root cause ( apart from the aforementioned updates )

I went down a few blind alleys, including playing with /etc/default/acpi-support, removing the chvt command from the resume scripts and using vbetool to toggle the display on.

Happily, after a couple of days of seriously hard work ( thank goodness for coffee ), I managed to find the solution or, to be more honest and accurate, I managed to find the solution that Dave Abrahams had posted here.

Before I post the solution, let me outline my environment: -

Hardware 2007-AE7 IBM Thinkpad T60p
OS Ubuntu Linux 8.10 ( Intrepid Ibex )
Kernel 2.6.27-9-generic
Graphics ATI MOBILITY FireGL V5200
OpenGL 2.1.8087 FireGL Release
Driver fglrx 8.54.3 [Oct 10 2008]
xorg-driver-fglrx ( 8.543-0ubuntu4 )
Compiz compiz-core 0.7.8-0ubuntu4.1
Fusion compiz-fusion-plugins-main 0.7.8-0ubuntu2.2
Suspend Mode pm-suspend

If it helps, here is my /etc/X11/xorg.conf as well as the listing produced by the sudo lspci -vv command here.

I've validated this solution on three separate Ubuntu environments, including my production build from November 2008, as well as two clean builds over the past two days.

As far as I can understand, the problem is that, during the suspend process, compiz fails to shut down normally and "locks" the virtual terminal on which X runs ( typically this is VT7 ). This does appear to be a BUG #197209 in Ubuntu that, I assume, has been recently introduced in a kernel or module update.

The "solution" or, to more precise, circumvention is use a script ( 00compiz-fglrx ) to kill compiz during the suspend process, and restart it on resume.

A second script ( 50compiz-fglrx-noclear ) is used to stop the Change Foreground Virtual Terminal ( chvt ) command from running until compiz is killed ( to be more specific, it "blacklists" the default /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00clear script from running on resume, thus preventing the chvt command from being run ).

Dave wrote these two scripts: -

/etc/pm/sleep.d/00compiz-fglrx

and: -

/etc/pm/config.d/50compiz-fglrx-noclear

These can be downloaded to, say, your home directory and then deployed as follows: -

sudo cp ~/00compiz-fglrx /etc/pm/sleep.d
chmod +x /etc/pm/sleep.d/00compiz-fglrx
sudo cp ~/50compiz-fglrx-noclear /etc/pm/config.d
chmod +x /etc/pm/config.d/50compiz-fglrx-noclear

Once deployed, check the file locations, execution bits and permissions as follows: -

ls -al /etc/pm/sleep.d/00compiz-fglrx

should return: -

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6746 2009-01-01 17:53 /etc/pm/sleep.d/00compiz-fglrx

and: -

ls -al /etc/pm/config.d/50compiz-fglrx-noclear

should return: -

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 182 2009-01-01 17:52 /etc/pm/config.d/50compiz-fglrx-noclear

Once you've rebooted, you should be able to suspend and resume without problems.

If needed, you can enable logging on the /etc/pm/sleep.d/00compiz-fglrx script by setting a value to the parameter LOG_FILE_NAME e.g. LOG_FILE_NAME='~/suspend.log'.

This newly-created logfile, along with /var/log/pm-suspend.log should help determine the cause of the problem.

Happy Holidays 8-)

Post-Christmas Blues - Not too much fun with ATI and Intrepid on the 2007-AE7 Thinkpad T60p

Hot on the heels of my previous posts here  and here, I found that things weren't as smooth as they could be, with Compiz crashing out from time to time.

I've played around over the past two days ( well, what else is Christmas Day and Boxing Day for ) and have taken a slightly different path to the same destination.

Instead of using Synaptic, Envy or apt get install, I chose to download the proprietary ATI driver from here.

This downloads a 80 MB file ati-driver-installer-8-12-x86.x86_64.run. It's necessary to make this file executable ( chmod +x ati-driver-installer-8-12-x86.x86_64.run ) and then execute it with root privileges ( sudo ./ati-driver-installer-8-12-x86.x86_64.run ).

The installer walks you through a series of simple screens, and, following a reboot, you're good to go.

Will continue to play ...