November 23, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Extensions, Firefox, Fonts, FTP, Internet, Linux, Review, Screenshot

Review: Firefox 3 Beta 1

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is available now. I downloaded the package yesterday morning and started using it right away. While using, I figured out some of the good things and at the same time there are some bad things about this test release. Here is what I feel about Firefox 3 Beta 1.

BTW, you can get beta 1 for Firefox 3 here. I am not going to tell, how to install firefox 🙂

Positives:

1.Nice Default Font:

Well someone may argue that you can configure any font in any version of Firefox, so whats the good thing about this default font in Firefox 3 Beta1. Well, I’ll say that configuration is always available but nobody gives a damn to configure the font in browser. I am liking this default font in FF3 Beta1 and everything now seems interesting to read. I have Read more than 40 wiki pages since last two days.

2.New FTP Listing Style:

The FTP listings in Firefox 3 Beta 1 has got new stylesheet. Its not dirty any more. It feels good while browsing ftp now. See the screen-shot below.

3.Website Identity:

This is new feature, but I couldn’t find it useful. When you click on favicon in the location bar, a pop-up kinda thing comes up, which tells about the identity of the site you are visiting. Check out the snapshot below.

4.Drag n Drop:

You can now hold any thing in Firefox 3 Beta 1 and drag it anywhere you want. Though I could not drop the images to gimp or anywhere else, it looks good. I think its in the development stage right now.

5.Bookmarks:

Bookmarking a website or editing your bookmarks is far easier now. You can edit a bookmarked site while its loading or can bookmark the site by just clicking a button. A new star-shaped button has been added in the location bar before the go button. If a site is not bookmarked, clicking the button will just bookmark it without asking for anything. If you again click on the button, now you can edit or delete the site you just bookmarked.

6.Adding Search Engine:

In firefox 3 beta 1, you can add the site you are browsing in you search engine list just like google, imdb, wikipedia, yahoo or whatever. But this is not valid for every website. Every website in this world can’t be a search engine 😛 Checkout the snapshot or KDE.

7.Link sorting/searching in location bar:

Firefox 3 beta 1 implements a new searching/sorting mechanism for links in location bar. As you type some letters, those are now searched in the link as well as the title of the page and then the links are sorted and displayed as list. In drop down list, you can also see the sites on your bookmarks.

8.Places Folder:

A new bookmark folder named ‘Places’ has been added. It has 6 sub-folders which contains links to different site based on a particular criterion. Some of them are ‘Recently Starred Pages’, ‘Recently Visited Starred Pages’, ‘Most Visited Starred Pages’ etc. I was looking for something like this since a long time. Because every time I login into my PC and fire up my firefox, first of all, I visit 8-10 sites (students mail, slashdot, iiit blogroll, yahoo mail, gmail, forum, orkut etc.). Now, I can open all of them in just one click. I click on ‘Most Visited Starred Pages’ and done.

9.Low Memory:

Well, a review of Firefox 3 Beta 1 on zdnet, say that Firefox 3 beta 1 is consuming low memory than Firefox 2 and IE 7. That review is for Firefox in windows. But in Fedora 7, I didn’t experience any reduction in memory usage.

10.Faster:

I don’t know how to justify this, but Firefox 3 Beta 1 seems to load pages faster. What I could think was that, when you click go, it loads the page in the background for some-time and then suddenly flushes the page to the screen and it appears that the entire page has been loaded in one go. I may be wrong though.

11.Improved GUI:

The rendering of buttons, input fields, images in the pages have improved a lot and buttons and drop down menus look better now.

Negatives:

1.Extensions:

Life is a bit or I should say a byte difficult with Firefox extensions. Now, I am too much used to use these extensions that I can’t live without them. I’ll crash if I don’t have ‘Undo Closed Tab’ extension. I keep making stupid mistakes. All the extensions are not yet available for Firefox 3, so its a problem.

2.Multiple Tabs:

Firefox 3 Beta 1 immediately dies if I open more than 20 tabs. I opened my wiki saved session (39 tabs) and after sometime I was searching for Firefox. Where the hell firefox window has gone?

3.Crashes:

I don’t know what exactly is the problem, but I think Firefox 3 revolts against Yahoo Mail and GMail. Whenever I open Yahoo Mail or GMail, Firefox 3 Beta 1 crashes. Either there is some problem with the heavily loaded mail pages or it doesn’t want me to use GMail or Yahoo.

Well, there may be lot more positives and negatives. These are the things I noticed about Firefox 3 Beta 1 in last two days. As the positives list is ruling the negatives, I am using Firefox 3 Beta 1 full time these days.

PS : @Paresh I think FF3 is better than FF2 in many ways. But you may want to wait for all the extensions to be compatible with FF3.

November 20, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Configuration, Hacks, HowTo, Installation, Linux, Server, Tips - Tricks

How To: Install and Configure Shoutcast Radio

Shoutcast is a mp3 broadcasting/streaming media server software provided by NullSoft. One can setup a server on any system, GNU/Linux / Windows/ MacOS and can stream mp3 over the network, internet/intranet. I setup shoutcast on my system a long back and found it very useful. Here is a step by step how to on how you can setup shoutcast on a GNU/Linux system.

Shoutcast can be installed even if you don’t have root privileges. But in that case you can’t use port less than 1024 for broadcasting. Below, I’ll explain how to install it for a non-root user.

Shoutcast server depends on a tool shoutcast DNAS for audio input in Linux. So, here we go

Step 1

Download the latest version of shoutcast from here. Download the one for Linux (glibc).

Step 2

Let us assume we want to install shoutcast in a directory named ‘shoutcast’ in user’s home directory and we want to broadcast punjabi songs.

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[saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# tar -xvzf sc_serv_1.9.8_Linux.tar.gz [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# mkdir punjabi [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# mv sc_serv.conf punjabi/sc_serv_punjabi.conf [Enter]

Step 3

Open sc_serv_punjabi.conf in your favorite editor and modify certain parameters as per you requirements. The essentials are below.

MaxUser=20
Password=yourPassword
PortBase=8300 #(Confirm that this port and the port PortBase+1 is not being used)
LogFile=none
RealTime=0
ScreenLog=0
ShowLastSongs=10
SrcIP=ANY
DestIP=ANY
Yport=80
NameLookups=0
AdminPassword=yourAdminPassword
TitleFormat=%s [IIIT Radio]

etc. My sc_serv.conf can be accessed here. That was all for installing the shoutcast server.

Now, the installation of DNAS tool is still pending. Here is a step by step procedure to install DNAS tool.

Step 1

Download the latest version of DNAS tool from here.

Step 2

[saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# tar -xvzf sc_trans_posix_040.tgz [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# cd sc_trans_040/ [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux sc_trans_040]# mv sc_trans_linux ../ [Enter]
[saini@bordeaux sc_trans_040]# mv sc_trans.conf ../punjabi/sc_trans_punjabi.conf [Enter]

Step 3

Go to punjabi directory and open sc_trans_punjabi.conf in your favorite editor and make changes according to your needs. Here are some

PlaylistFile=/exactPathTo/punjabi.lst
ServerIP=
ServerPort=
 # 8300 in this case
Password=
 # yourPassword in this case
StreamTitle= %s
StreamURL=
Shuffle=1 # (1 for random songs)

etc. My sc_trans.conf can be accessed here.

Step 4

Generate a list of all the songs (mp3) you have and put it in punjabi.lst in punjabi directory.

[saini@bordeaux punjabi]# find /pathToPunjabiDir/ -type f -name "*.mp3" > punjabi.lst [Enter]

My dummy punjabi.lst can be accessed here.

The configuration part of shoutcast server with audio input is complete. Now we have to run the server so that we can listen to music.

Go to the shoutcast directory and run the sc_serv first and then run the sc_trans_linux. Here is way to do that.

1 2	[saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# ./sc_serv punjabi/sc_serv_punjabi.conf > /dev/null 2> /dev/null & [saini@bordeaux shoutcast]# ./sc_trans_linux punjabi/sc_trans_punjabi.conf > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &

Now your system is a shoutcast server. Any client can use mplayer, vlc, amarok or any other multimedia player that support streaming media to listen to the music being played on your server.

1 2	[saini@bordeaux saini]# mplayer http://yourIp:port [Enter] [saini@bordeaux saini]# mplayer http://localhost:8300 [Enter] # (in the above case).

If you want shoutcast to start every time your system boots. Put these lines in /etc/rc.local

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/home/saini/shoutcast/sc_serv /home/saini/shoutcast/punjabi/sc_serv_punjabi.conf > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &
/home/saini/shoutcast/sc_trans_linux /home/saini/shoutcast/punjabi/sc_trans_punjabi.conf > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &

Shoutcast is fun and its more fun when everyone listens to what you are listening to 🙂

November 9, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Eclipse, Hacks, HowTo, Installation, Linux, Programming, Screenshot, Tips - Tricks

How To: Install Javascript Plugin in Eclipse

Today, I installed Eclipse on my Fedora 7 desktop. Everything is fine, but the default Eclipse does not have a plugin for JavaScript. So , I searched a lot on Google and read a lot of reviews about some JavaScript plugins available for Eclipse. And I finally reached the JSEclipse plugin by Adobe Labs. I had a good experience with it. Its great to work with and if you are looking for a javascript plugin for eclipse, just don’t search any more and install it. JSEclipse can be downloaded from here after registering with Adobe. Following are the simple steps to install the JSEclipse.

Launch Eclipse and do as suggested in images.

Step 1 :

Follow this image :

Step 2:

Select “Search new features to install” and click next.

Step 3:

Click “New archived site” and select the package or zip file you just downloaded from the above link and click open.

Step 4: Click OK.

Step 5: Check the package if not checked and click next.

Step 6: Check the features you want to install and click next.

Step 7: Accept Terms and conditions and click next.

Step 8: Click finish and when it ask to restart eclipse just click yes.

Step 9: Voila !! JavaScript plugin is installed now. Have fun with it.

PS: A lot of howtos are pending. Will Try to finish them asap 😀

September 8, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Administration, Configuration, FTP, FTP Server, HowTo, Linux, Security, Server

How To: Configure Secure FTP Server (VSFTPD)

This post is totally dedicated to vsftpd configuration with uploads enabled. vsftpd stands for Very Secure FTP Daemon. It is shipped with almost all the latest Red Hat based OS. vsftpd for rpm based Linux distros can be downloaded from here. Also, one can install vsftpd by issuing ‘yum install vsftpd’ or ‘apt-get install vsftpd’ command. After installing vsftpd, you just need to start the vsftpd service.

[root@bordeaux saini]$ service vsftpd start [Enter]

And you are done. Your computer is now a FTP server. You can browse your ftp server by pointing your favourite browser to ftp://localhost/ or ftp://127.0.0.1/ or ftp://<IP_ADDRESS_OF_YOUR_MACHINE> .

If you see access denied or some error related to access. Issue ‘iptables –flush’ and ‘setenforce 0’ commands.

By default the files and directories in /var/ftp/ directory will be shown at ftp://localhost/ . Now, there are two ways to share your files on ftp.

1. Copy/move files that you want to share to /var/ftp/ directory.

2. Mount directories you want to share to /var/ftp/SharedDirName. Suppose you want to share /home/saini/Movies/ folder on your ftp, then follow the following steps:

Step 1

1 2	[saini@bordeaux saini]$ su [Enter] Enter Password for root.

Step 2

Go to /var/ftp/ and create the directory that you want to share.

1 2	[root@bordeaux saini]$ cd /var/ftp/ [Enter] [root@bordeaux ftp]$ mkdir SharedMovies [Enter]

Step 3

Bind the original directory to SharedMovies.

[root@bordeaux ftp]$ mount --bind /home/saini/Movies/ /var/ftp/SharedMovies/ [Enter]

If you browse your ftp now, you’ll see SharedMovies folder as well. You can remove default pub directory if you don’t like it.

The current ftp server will be a very basic one and will allow only downloads. Below we will see how to configure it so that others are allowed to upload files/directories to your server.

Step 1

Create a directory say ‘Upload’.

[root@bordeaux saini]$ mkdir Upload [Enter]

Note that this Upload directory can be anywhere either in your home directory or in /var/ftp/ or even on some other partitions.

Step 2

Change the ownership of Upload to ftp and change the permissions to 777.

1 2	[root@bordeaux saini]$ chown ftp:ftp Upload [Enter] [root@bordeaux saini]$ chmod 777 Upload [Enter]

Step 3

If you created Upload at any place other than /var/ftp/ , then bind it to a dir in /var/ftp/ .

1 2	[root@bordeaux saini]$ mkdir /var/ftp/Uploads [Enter] [root@bordeaux saini]$ mount --bind /home/saini/Upload/ /var/ftp/Uploads/ [Enter]

Step 4

Configure vsftpd.conf . The default configuration files for vsftpd lives in /etc/vsftpd/ . vsftpd.conf is configuration file for vsftpd.
Open /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf in any editor and add/uncomment the following lines :

Lines to be added or uncomments in /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf

anonymous_enable=YES
write_enable=YES
write_enable=YES
anon_upload_enable=YES
anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES
anon_other_write_enable=YES
dirmessage_enable=YES
dirlist_enable=YES
no_anon_password=YES
file_open_mode=0777
guest_enable=YES

Save vsftpd.conf file and restart the vsftpd service with the command ‘service vsftpd restart’. Now anyone can upload files to your ftp server, but only to Upload folder.

There are certain more configurations which are related to restricting bandwidth, upload/download speed, connections etc.

max_per_ip=2 # Max no. of allowed connections per IP Address.
max_clients=3 # Max no. of different IP Addressed which are allowed to connect.
anon_max_rate=1097152 # Max bytes/sec a user can upload/download to/from your ftp server.
banner_file=/etc/vsftpd/ftp_banner # The file containing the welcome message to be displayed to the clients.

For more configuration options, refer man pages for vsftpd.conf and vsftpd.

Note :

Whenever you restart your computer, you have to bind the directories everytime, so that they are shown on the ftp server. To skip binding every time, write everything (all commands for binding) in a mount.sh file and run it whenever you restart your computer.
You can view my vsftpd.conf file here.
Sometime, uploaded files doesn’t have 777 permissions. You can run this shell script in background forever.

PS0 : Absence of compat-libstdc++-33(libstdc++.so.5) is breaking a large no. of applications in Fedora 7. Here’s a solution anyway.

September 2, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Configuration, Drivers, Graphics, Hacks, HowTo, Installation, Java, Linux, NVIDIA, Screenshot

How To: Install and Configure Looking Glass 3D Desktop

I saw a video from Sun MicroSystems last year, in which they showed a demo version of a 3D desktop environment. It was really awesome and was the really 3D desktop environment. A lot of 3D desktop emulators are available currently like beryl, but they are not really 3D. Because one can’t go behind the windows, terminals etc. Believe me, Looking Glass 3D is far better than all vistas and beryls if only graphics are compared. Around two-three weeks when I was going through one of the tech magazines in library, I came across a topic which discussed desktop environments for Linux. I was surprised to see Project Looking Glass over there. Day before yesterday, I downloaded the Project Looking Glass 3D desktop environment for Linux from here.Project Looking Glass 3D desktop environment is a purely Java based desktop environment and it runs on top of Java virtual machine. It requires graphics card (at least on board). Here is a way to install nVidia drivers in Linux. The other requirement like processor and RAM are quite low and almost all systems can qualify for that. Looking Glass 3D is very easy to install. Below are the steps to install it on Fedora 7 (kernel-2.6.22.1-41.fc7, but the steps for other operating systems may be similar.

Step 1

Get lg3d–1-0-0-linux-i686-0612190943.bin from here.

Step 2

In a terminal switch to root user.

1 2	[saini@bordeaux saini]$ su [Enter] Enter root password.

Step 3

Move the lg3d–1-0-0-linux-i686-0612190943.bin to /usr/share/ and go to directory /usr/share/

1 2	[root@bordeaux saini]$ mv lg3d--1-0-0-linux-i686-0612190943.bin /usr/share/ [Enter] [root@bordeaux saini]$ cd /usr/share/ [Enter]

Step 4

Extract lg3d–1-0-0-linux-i686-0612190943.bin

[root@bordeaux share]$ bash  lg3d--1-0-0-linux-i686-0612190943.bin [Enter]

The files will be extracted to /usr/share/lg3d/

Step 5

Logout and login into root’s desktop environment and go to the directory /usr/share/lg3d/bin/

[root@bordeaux root$ cd /usr/share/lg3d/bin/ [Enter]

Step 6

Execute the following command.

[root@bordeaux bin]$ bash ./postinstall [Enter]

If this command doesn’t give any error, that means you have successfully installed the Looking Glass 3D desktop environment.

Now logout and on the login screen, choose Looking Glass as the desktop environment. Just login into your account and what you will see will be more than a surprise. Below are some screenshots of my Looking Glass 3D desktop. You can browse all my screenshots here .

PS0 : It may the best 3D desktop environment but is not really usable on slower machines especially with low end graphics cards.