fragility

I’ve been using Ubuntu Hardy Heron since I got my new laptop (ended up getting a refund for the CR-21 and got a CR-31) but when I tried to start Firefox 3 it complained that the majority of my extensions weren’t FF3 compatible. I didn’t really had the time to investigate the issue so I installed Firefox 2 (which is still available on Hardy’s repositories) and kept using it. However, I’ve been reading so many blog posts and tweets on how Firefox 3 is blazingly fast that I had to try it. And it is. It’s stupidly fast. I can’t even believe this is really Firefox. As for memory consumption, it’s too early to tell (I’ve only been using it for a few hours now) but so far seems better.

By the way, regarding the new laptop, I’m keeping a wiki page about it which I’ll be updating with more details later.

So, after searching for a while I found out that some of the extensions I use have beta versions which are already compatible with FF3, so I decided to give them a try. Here’s the list of extensions which are not FF3 compatible and how I managed to install them or the alternatives I’m using.

Adblock
Not compatible with FF3 but it seems kind of unmaintained anyway, so I installed AdBlockPlus instead (which seems like what everyone’s been using for some time anyway).

del.icio.us Bookmarks
According to this discussion the extension is ready but it only works over the next delicious version which has not yet been released to the public. I’ll be following the news on the delicious blog closely.

I ended up using a hack which bypasses the check for extension compatibility, but if this turns out to cause any instability I’ll use the bookmarklet.

Firebug
Had to install 1.1 beta from http://getfirebug.com/releases/.

FireFTP
Had to install the latest preview from http://fireftp.mozdev.org/developers.html.

FireGPG
Had to install the latest svn. More info on http://firegpg.tuxfamily.org/?page=install&lang=en.

Gmail Manager
Supposedly there’s a FF3 compatible version on this discussion thread but this is probably just a hacked version of the regular extension and FF3 crashes on start. This is a handy extension but I don’t consider it essential so I don’t really mind not having it around for a while.

Google Gears
Doesn’t seem to be compatible with Firefox 3 yet, but I don’t really use it much these days. Maybe I’ll drop it for now. The hack I talked about before lets the extension load but I prefer to disable it for now to avoid any issues.

Google Toolbar
Doesn’t seem to work either but I only used it to check on the Pagerank so I guess I’ll drop it too.

TinyURL Creator
No compatible version available, but works with the compatibility bypass. There’s also an alternative bookmarklet.

User Agent Switcher and Web Developer
Apparently, the developer of these two extensions refused to release Firefox 3 compatible versions until the Firefox 3 final version is out, but the Firefox developers are asking for add-on creators to update their add-ons to check for any issues so the creator says he’ll be releasing a test version soon. I just hope he hurries because this is has always been one of my favorite extensions and I’m sure lots of webdevelopers rely on this extension as a part of their work. Oh and these two don’t load even with the compatibility bypass.

Like I said in my previous post, I bought a new laptop. And no, it’s not one of those fruit laptops. It’s a white Sony Vaio :p

Of course I installed Ubuntu on it right away, and I actually thought most things would work out of the box here, according to someone on Ubuntu Forums, but looks like the guy was wrong.

Wifi worked out of the box. But sound and suspend/hibernate didn’t. I already solved those two issues (installing a more recent kernel) but lost the wifi configuration in the way and I have lots of work to do today so I won’t be fiddling with that until tomorrow. I’m compiling a list of all the issues and how to solve them and will post them later on a Ubuntu Forums thread related to this model (which I’ll link to later).

A post on why I chose this laptop and not a Macbook (which was in fact my other option) will come later.