Friday, June 20, 2008

Firefox download fiesta : Awesome record indeed!



Firefox download day was on June 17, 2008 (US timezone). The original target was 5 million downloads in 24 hours. Not only they reached the target but exceeding it by 3 millions. The best record ever for firefox downloads in a single day. The people of Guiness World Record has yet to validate the record. Please check back here again after a few days.

RankCountryPledges
1United States3,915,375
2Germany1,068,315
3Japan714,845
4United Kingdom488,031
5Iran480,550
6Spain440,801
7France436,447
8Lithuania370,750
9Canada365,852
10Italy364,634


Although the time to set the record has over, you are encouraged to download firefox 3 because it has over 15,000 improvements over previous versions. See release notes for more details.

(Excerpt from Mozilla page)

What’s New in Firefox 3:

The Web is all about innovation, and Firefox 3 sets the pace with dozens of new features to deliver a faster, more secure and customizable Web browsing experience for all.

User Experience. The enhancements to Firefox 3 provide the best possible browsing experience on the Web. The new Firefox 3 smart location bar, affectionately known as the “Awesome Bar,” learns as people use it, adapting to user preferences and offering better fitting matches over time. The Firefox 3 Library archives browsing history, bookmarks, and tags, where they can be easily searched and organized. One-click bookmarking and tagging make it easy to remember, search and organize Web sites. The new full-page zoom displays any part of a Web page, up close and readable, in seconds.

Performance. Firefox 3 is built on top of the powerful new Gecko 1.9 platform, resulting in a safer, easier to use and more personal product. Firefox 3 now uses less memory while it’s running, and its redesigned page rendering and layout engine means users see Web pages two to three times faster than Firefox 2.

Security. Firefox 3 raises the bar for security. The new malware and phishing protection helps protect from viruses, worms, trojans and spyware to keep people safe on the Web. Firefox 3’s one-click site ID information allows users to verify that a site is what it claims to be. Mozilla’s open source process leverages the experience of thousands of security experts around the globe.

Customization. Everyone uses the Web differently, and Firefox 3 lets users customize their browser with more than 5,000 add-ons. Firefox Add-ons allow users to manage tasks like participating in online auctions, uploading digital photos, seeing the weather forecasts, and listening to music, all from the convenience of the browser. The new Add-ons Manager helps users to find and install add-ons directly from the browser.

For more information about Mozilla Firefox 3 and how it delivers an easier, faster, and safer online experience, visit http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/features.

Mozilla Firefox 3 is available now for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems as a free download from http://www.getfirefox.com.


Other related stuffs

See youtube video what people said about Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Digital Memory Bank
Press coverage on standblog

Thursday, June 5, 2008

openSUSE and iMac G3

If you have an iMac G3 and want to install Linux (instead of throwing it out of your window and kills 2 people :P), you may want to try openSUSE. From my experience, openSuse is the best distro for it. What about other distro? Well, i've tried Ubuntu. It is not suitable for this type of iMac. YDL? The installation went smoothly but i had to tweak the X before it worked. One caveat though. If your iMac doesn't have DVD drive, you have to install via internet. First you have to download the install iso and burn it to CD. Boot from the CD and there's menu for you to choose. Choose installation and update. For more info on this, click here.

You will be asked for repository IP address. You can put name address instead of IP. Then, you will asked for directory for packages. Enter the directory. You can find them here. Please choose a repository near you.

Any question regarding installation, just ask here. Maybe I can help. :)

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

upgrading zlib

I have to upgrade my zlib to version 1.2.3 to upgrade clamav 0.93. If you have recent version (after July 18,2005), you might have it installed already. For older distros, upgrade is a must to avoid security vulnerabilities in 1.2.1 and 1.2.2. You can download the source code here : http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

Install from source.
1. unpack the source : tar xzvf zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz
2. change to source dir: cd zlib-1.2.3
3. configure it: ./configure --shared --prefix=/usr
4. 'make' it: make
5. install it: make install (this will install the library in dir /usr)

Extra check:
1. Go to /usr/lib and check whether symbolic links are ok :
[root@proxy lib]# ls -l libz*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 May 16 06:29 libz.so -> libz.so.1.2.3*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 May 16 06:29 libz.so.1 -> libz.so.1.2.3*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 82305 May 16 06:29 libz.so.1.2.3*

If old libraries are still lying around or libz.so and libz.so.1 point to old library e.g libz.so -> libz.so.1.2.1, delete them.

That's all there is to it.

Reference:
zlib home

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Installing CentOS 5.1



Hi all,

I am installing CentOS 5.1 to a machine at my friend's office. I had to download 7 ISOs beforehand but it needs only 5 CDs for complete installation (depending on what packages I want to install). I might have downloaded the DVD iso but since I don't have DVD-RW drive, I chose to download the CD ISOs.

The machine is HP Proliant 350 G5 with Intel Xeon processor and it is a 64-bit machine (as all modern Xeon processors are). The machine has been installed Fedora Core 5 before and it had many problems as FC5 is designed for desktop and not server. This should be expected. The machine will be used for database, dhcp and DNS server.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Upgrading Mandriva 2008 to Mandriva 2008.1 aka Mandriva Spring

Screenshot of KDE 4 on Mandriva Spring 2008

Here are the steps to upgrade mandriva 2008 to 2008.1 via online repos.

1) Back up the current urpmi.cfg
2) Change the repos mentioned in urpmi.cfg from 2008.0 to 2008.1
3) Run urpmi.update -a to verify repos
4) urpmi --auto-update -v

If there are problems with dependencies, remove the old versions (notably KDE4 as in my experience, yours maybe with different packages). Then in some cases you have to run this command:

5) urpmi --auto-select

Relax and sit back while watching the packages being upgraded. For my system, almost 1600 packages upgraded. Lastly, you will be instructed to reboot the system because of kernel and dbus upgrade. So far the new system is running smoothly without problem.

reference: Mandriva Forum

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

My history of commands

Based on kagesenshi's post titled Me! Me!, I also want to know what commands were used by me regularly. So:

[zamri@localhost ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
126 ssh
100 ls
97 smbclient
86 cd
76 su
58 wine
48 ping
35 joe
32 exit
17 ps

There you go. The ouput isn't surprising. I did lots of ssh to my servers and wine (ahaaa!! surprise!), I played windows games a lot for the last 4 months. Now I stop playing 'em completely. It is boring when you always win. :P

Nvidia new hotplug feature on Linux

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