The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[BetterRed]

Anyone know how to customise keyboard shortcuts in firefox quantum. Back in the days of XUL I had an extension - something like Customise Keyboard

In particular I want to disable Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I, both of which toggle the bookmarks sidebar Ψ³

BR

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Anyone know how to customise keyboard shortcuts in firefox quantum. Back in the days of XUL I had an extension - something like Customise Keyboard

In particular I want to disable Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I, both of which toggle the bookmarks sidebar Ψ³

I not sure that's possible on Firefox Quantum. XUL is deprecated and going away. WebExtensions support is up in the air. There's an outstanding bug in Bugzilla that claims Resolved Fixed in Firefox 66, but it's not clear this covers what you want. There is a recommendation there to install Saka Key, which appears to work here in Firefox 55, and there is an extension called Shortkeys . which also seems to work.

Saka tries to provide Vim style key mapping. Shortkeys uses more standard maps. But both seem to only work in tabs where you are viewing sites. Firefox doesn't seem to permit global key mapping affecting the entire browser, so it may not be possible to simply disable ^B/^I.

There are instructions elsewhere for opening and editing the omni.ja file where this stuff is defined as another method short of recompiling FF from source, but I haven't really looked at it.

Why do you want to disable ^B/^I? What wuld you use instead to perform the function?
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Dennis

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Why do you want to disable ^B/^I? What wuld you use instead to perform the function?

Some sites allow use of Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I to do what they normally do - embolden and italicise typed text.

I have the side bar open more or less permanently, so on the rare occasion I wanted it closed I would left click the close button, or I might use something like Ctrl+Alt+B. My standard preferred pattern for toggling is Ctrl+Alt+whatever.

BR

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Some sites allow use of Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I to do what they normally do - embolden and italicise typed text.

I have the side bar open more or less permanently, so on the rare occasion I wanted it closed I would left click the close button, or I might use something like Ctrl+Alt+B. My standard preferred pattern for toggling is Ctrl+Alt+whatever.

Okay, that's about what I thought.

I use ^B to toggle the sidebar, and don't normally have bookmarks open in it. I use an extension called Group Speed Dial which replaces the default home page and lets me group sites I frequently visit in tabs for fast access. I don't normally need to access the bookmarks.

Yes, not having Control-key combos passed to sites that can use them is a pain, but it's mainly an annoyance here, and sites I visit have other ways to do that on selected text. (And I generally know the codes to embed in the text to do bold/italic/etc so I can insert them.)

I also use an extension called withExEditor. I used to use an extension called "It's All Text" that would grab text in a text box and copy it into my preferred editor ( Notepad3) for editing. Save the text in the editor and it got inserted into the text box. That broke in FF Quantum. withEditorEx provides a work around. It calls node.js to retrieve text into my preferred editor, then uses node.js to paste the edited text into the text box on the site. It's a bit of a chore to configure, starting with having to install node.js, but works once you have. The fundamental issue is that FF no longer lets you do that sort of thing locally. It has to be passed to an external server that can then upload it to the site. (I'm using it now to crete this reply.)

I'm mostly pleased with Quantum, now that I found WebEx extensions to replace core functionality of stuff I used to run, but the paranoia about security gets bothersome. I'm all in favor of security, but I'd be happier if the Mozilla devs could point to actual exploits of the capabilities they disallow instead of "This could be used for bad intent, therefore we won't let it be used."

But we are increasingly stuck with it. Current browser development is all going in that direction, and Chrome has just as many annoyances.

Now Mirosoft is ceasing development of Edge and shifting to the Blink rendering engine used by Google. Opera had already ceased development of the Pango engine they used and switched to Blink. MS is suggesting Mozilla drop Gecko and also switch to Blink.

I am not thrilled by the notion of "One rendering engine to rule them all", as we are all then stuck with whatever that engine is allowed to do, and that's being steadily cut back in the interests of security.

I'm sticking with FF as the best extant option.
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Dennis

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Okay, that's about what I thought.

I use ^B to toggle the sidebar, and don't normally have bookmarks open in it. I use an extension called Group Speed Dial which replaces the default home page and lets me group sites I frequently visit in tabs for fast access. I don't normally need to access the bookmarks.

Yes, not having Control-key combos passed to sites that can use them is a pain, but it's mainly an annoyance here, and sites I visit have other ways to do that on selected text. (And I generally know the codes to embed in the text to do bold/italic/etc so I can insert them.)

I also use an extension called withExEditor. I used to use an extension called "It's All Text" that would grab text in a text box and copy it into my preferred editor ( Notepad3) for editing. Save the text in the editor and it got inserted into the text box. That broke in FF Quantum. withEditorEx provides a work around. It calls node.js to retrieve text into my preferred editor, then uses node.js to paste the edited text into the text box on the site. It's a bit of a chore to configure, starting with having to install node.js, but works once you have. The fundamental issue is that FF no longer lets you do that sort of thing locally. It has to be passed to an external server that can then upload it to the site. (I'm using it now to crete this reply.)

I'm mostly pleased with Quantum, now that I found WebEx extensions to replace core functionality of stuff I used to run, but the paranoia about security gets bothersome. I'm all in favor of security, but I'd be happier if the Mozilla devs could point to actual exploits of the capabilities they disallow instead of "This could be used for bad intent, therefore we won't let it be used."

But we are increasingly stuck with it. Current browser development is all going in that direction, and Chrome has just as many annoyances.

Now Mirosoft is ceasing development of Edge and shifting to the Blink rendering engine used by Google. Opera had already ceased development of the Pango engine they used and switched to Blink. MS is suggesting Mozilla drop Gecko and also switch to Blink.

I am not thrilled by the notion of "One rendering engine to rule them all", as we are all then stuck with whatever that engine is allowed to do, and that's being steadily cut back in the interests of security.

I'm sticking with FF as the best extant option.
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Dennis

As I posted yesterday in the calibre plugin ideas thread, "Sometimes I wonder if we're regressing to Mosaic."

Since the latest update (v 65) to Firefox Quaintarse, this site is one of those where I can no longer use Ctrl+B and Ctrl/I for their time honoured purpose.

Added: I pin my frequently visited sites and use Ctrl+PgDown to get to them, IIRC the speed dial thing is too mouse centric.

BR

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

As I posted yesterday in the calibre plugin ideas thread, "Sometimes I wonder if we're regressing to Mosaic."

You can make a case for it...

But as mentioned previously, we are increasingly stuck with the limitations you complain about, because everybody has them.

Since the latest update (v 65) to Firefox Quaintarse, this site is one of those where I can no longer use Ctrl+B and Ctrl/I.

<blink> I hadn't noticed, but then, I have the appropriate BB codes fairly well memorized, and insert them directly.

Added: I pin my frequently visited sites and use Ctrl+PgDown to get to them, IIRC the speed dial thing is too mouse centric.

I use both keyboard and mouse, so things like Group Speed Dial work well for me.

I retain enough keyboard chops to operate from a command line and the like, but I do like GUIs.
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Dennis

[BetterRed]

ITC seems to be heading towards a Stalinist Nanny state of affairs. Imagine if every motor car had the same drive train, but there were Toyota only, Volvo only, and Chevrolet only, etc roads; as well as Nissan only, and BMW only, etc fuel pumps and chargers.

BR

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

ITC seems to be heading towards a Stalinist Nanny state of affairs. Imagine if every motor car had the same drive train, but there were Toyota only, Volvo only, and Chevrolet only, etc roads; as well as Nissan only, and BMW only, etc fuel pumps and chargers.

Interesting analogy, though I suspect it would work out a bit differently, especially in the notion of different roads.

A good chunk of what we're seeing comes down to basic economics. A new market opens, and a bunch of players enter it. Competition occurs. Some folks succeed and grow bigger. Some folks fail, or get acquired by a larger company. Eventually, you get two or three big outfits, and some smaller players serving niches too small to be profitable for the big boys.

The browser market has been an example. I've looked at a large number of the years. Very few still exist.

One of the reasons is the continual advance in web standards. Consider the current state, where HTML5, CSS3, and a current version of JavaScript are essentially required. HTML5 is still a work in progress.

Rendering engines are increasingly large and complex and take a lot of time and effort to develop and maintain. Google and Mozilla have large teams of developers working on Blink and Gecko. Following Mozilla bugs in Bugzilla is fun, because it must be triaged and confirmed to be a bug, then a determination of just where the bug is must be made (because the underlying problem may not be in the code where it blew up), and then the developers must be found who know enough about that section of the code to make the fix.

The sheer effort and cost involved in supporting and extending rendering engines leaves few outfits available that can. Opera gave up on their Pango engine and moved to Webkit, and when Google forked Webkit to become Blink, Opera followed. IE abandoned the Trident engine used by IE and developed a new one called Spartan that was used by Edge. Now they are abandoning Spartan and moving to Blink. Webkit is still around, supported by Apple in Safari and used in things like the Falkon browser, but what else is there? Very little.

Another factor is increasing coordination in what is supported. There was already alignment between Chrome, Edge, and Firefox in terms of APIs and what JavaScript was permitted to do, to the point where it was possible to write extensions that could be installed into Chrome, Edge, or Firefox with minor code changes. The demise of Edge doesn't change that.

I'm unhappy because the changes mean less configurability and less power, and various things I used to do can't be done now, but I'm stuck with it. My biggest objection is that I think there are things that could be done if the user was willing to accept some risk and knew what they were doing, and a power user setting where sophisticated users could say "I understand the risks, and upon my head be it. Do this!" would be nice. We'll see if that happens.
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Dennis

[Blossom]

They've made XP pretty much inoperable for internet this past year. It's time to install a different operating system on my netbook. I really have no choice.

So I'm looking at Linux Mint. What do you think? I want internet, ability to run a few office like Libre Office programs and some old windows programs like yWriter.

Its a Toshiba NB200 with RAM upgraded to 2GB.

Pros?
Cons?

This is a huge leap for me.

Will I need drivers for sound, keyboard like Windows does or how does that work? I am a total newbie to Linux.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[cc_in_oh]

I ran across this article a few weeks ago:


https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-...linux-desktop/

It has a link to another article to make a bootable disk or flash drive if you want to test drive it before installing...

[Adoby]

Originally Posted by Blossom

They've made XP pretty much inoperable for internet this past year. It's time to install a different operating system on my netbook. I really have no choice.

So I'm looking at Linux Mint. What do you think? I want internet, ability to run a few office like Libre Office programs and some old windows programs like yWriter.

Its a Toshiba NB200 with RAM upgraded to 2GB.

Pros?
Cons?

This is a huge leap for me.

Will I need drivers for sound, keyboard like Windows does or how does that work? I am a total newbie to Linux.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

Linux Mint is great for converting windows users.

You will not need any extra drivers provided that your hardware is not brand new. The HWE-stack (HardWare Enablement) that is part of any modern version of Linux can handle all common hardware. There is some hardware that is very tied to Windows. Cheap printers and scanners. Or some special gizmos and controllers on some special newer netbooks/laptops. But then it may still be possible to get things working fully by searching the internet for reports, from other owners of the same hardware, on how they got things working.

You can test before you take the plunge by booting Linux Mint from a USB thumbdrive and test it with your hardware.

No need for any antivirus either.

However with "only" 2GB RAM it may be better to try a Linux version that is made for older computers with limited memory. Linux Mint may work, but might feel sluggish. Other version of Linux will not only work but feel positively snappy and have great performance. Here are some alternatives: (I haven't really tested any of them.)

https://itsfoss.com/lightweight-linux-beginners/

I run Ubuntu Linux on a 13" HP laptop, and everything is fine. 8GB RAM. I had to repartition the SSD to remove the earlier OS (Win10) and some hidden partitions.

I have helped several friends to install Linux as well. And I usually recommend Linux Mint for new Linux Users. It is also possible to have for instance Ubunty Linux switch between the normal Gnome Shell interface, KDE or Mint, as you want, when you login. It is Ubuntu underneath but with different user interfaces.

[DMcCunney]

s.

Originally Posted by Blossom

They've made XP pretty much inoperable for internet this past year. It's time to install a different operating system on my netbook. I really have no choice.

So I'm looking at Linux Mint. What do you think? I want internet, ability to run a few office like Libre Office programs and some old windows programs like yWriter.

Its a Toshiba NB200 with RAM upgraded to 2GB.

Pros?
Cons?

This is a huge leap for me.

Will I need drivers for sound, keyboard like Windows does or how does that work? I am a total newbie to Linux.

The biggest con I can see is "low end machine". I'd want a lot more than 2GB RAM.

Also be aware that Linux is different. You will need to learn a new OS with new GUI, and new programs to do what you normally do. That learning curve is the biggest roadblock to Linux adoption on the desktop. Most folks learn just enough about the PC to do what they need to do and stop. Even new versions of existing stuff can get resistance because they will be different.

I did something like this a while back on an old Acer netbook. It had a 1.6 ghz Atom processor, 1.5GB RAM, and a 40GB HD. It used onboard ATI graphics. It came to me with WinXP Home.

I repartitioned the disk to create a slice for Linux and installed Ubuntu, on which Mint is based. I chose Lxde as the lightest weight GUI. The end result was a machine which dual-booted and I could choose Linux or XP at boot time.

I like Ubuntu because it does the best job I've seen in a Linux distro of figuring out what it's installing on, setting itself up, and Just Working. Connecting to the Internet tends to be a problem with other distros, but Ubuntu handles it fine. Once installed, it should be able to connect to the Internet.

Linux has generic drivers for most peripherals, so you shouldn't have a problem. The folks with driver woes tend to have high end graphics cards from nVidia and AMD-ATI that are not well supported by the open source drivers.

You can install a browser and things like Libre Office and have what you mostly need.

Running Windows programs requires installing Wine. I don't know offhand if yWriter runs under it, but it should.

Just don't expect snappy performance. Linux really likes RAM, and tries to run entirely in RAM if it has it. With 2GB, it won't. Linux on the old netbook here works but is slow. (I could theoretically take RAM to 2GB from the 1.5GB it has, but I don't believe the performance boost would justify the cost.)

One thing I do plan to do is replace the HD with an SSD. Those are getting cheap. I found a budget line 120GB SSD for $30. SSD technology has been steadily improving, so the fact that it's a budget line drive doesn't scare me. I don't expect failures.

Since a major factor in slow speed is disk I/O, going to SSD should be a nice performance boost. There isn't a lot on the netbook I need to preserve, so I'll likely just back up some files to a USB frive, then pull the HD and swap in the SSD and do a fresh install of Linux. I spend most time on the Linux side now. Not having XP in the mix won't be a loss.
______
Dennis

[Blossom]

Thanks to both of you. After trying Linux Mint I went with Linux Mint XFCE. Installation went smooth. Hit a snag with brightness control, took a couple hours but got it fixed. I then hit another snag with Wine but got that straighten out. Now I just need to get the network working. When I try to access my external drive on my Vista desktop it promps for a password. There is no password on that machine. I've tried a few suggestions but nothing yet.

As for performance. It runs better than XP ever did which lagged taking forever to do anything. Uses very little memory compared to XP as well. I'm quite happy with the change. It is a big learning curve.

Terminal is like powershell/command line on steroids. lol

Libre Office comes preinstalled which is a plus.

Sent from my Moto E

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Adoby

However with "only" 2GB RAM it may be better to try a Linux version that is made for older computers with limited memory. Linux Mint may work, but might feel sluggish. Other version of Linux will not only work but feel positively snappy and have great performance. Here are some alternatives: (I haven't really tested any of them.)

https://itsfoss.com/lightweight-linux-beginners/

I looked at several of those, and ran Puppy for a while.

Damn Small Linux was an attempt to create a distro whose ISO size was 50MB in size. The scarce resource it was created for was network bandwidth, and it tried to be a distro you could get over a dial up modem connection. Development finally hit a wall when it was no longer possible to make upgrades and still stay within the 50MB limit.

TinyCore is also a tiny distro, but its tactic is a minimal ISO that just installs a base Linux system and lightweight GUI. Once it's up and running, you add applications after the fact.

Puppy is small but quirky, and very non-standard. I installed it on an ancient (circa 2005) Fujitsu p2110 notebook. It was a pass along from a friend who had upgraded to something more powerful, but loved it and didn't want to see it go into a dumpster. She said it was "slow, slow, slow".

Well, no surprise. It came with a whopping 256MB RAM, and used a Transmeta CPU. The Transmeta was an early attempt at power saving, and the CPU grabbed 16MB of RAM off the top for "code morphing", leaving 240MB RAM for the user. (Linus Torvald's first job in the US was at Transmeta.) It was further limited by an IDE4 HD. (That was a BIOS limitation, so swapping in a faster drive wasn't an option.) It came to me with WinXP Pro SP2 installed. It took 8 minutes just to boot, and much longer to do anything once up.

I viewed it as a test bed to see what performance I might wring out ot it without spending money. I swapped the original 30GB drive for a 40GB unit from a failed laptop, repartitioned, and installed Win2K Pro SP4, Puppy Linux, Ubuntu, and FreeDOS.

Win2K actually ran more or less acceptably, after I removed everything form startup that could be removed. A big win was disabling the Windows Update service. It wasn't going to get any, so why have it active? That saved 10MB RAM and a svchost.exe process.

Puppy and Ubuntu were installed on separate ext4 slices, but configured so each would mount the other's file system when booted. I spent some time setting things up so the was one copy of large apps, accessible from either system. Both could see the Windows NTFS partition, and I had a driver for Windows that let it see and access the Linux file systems. The odd man out was FreeDOS, which could only see its own slice, but I didn't care.

Puppy booted quickly, and the default GUI is very low resource. The problems came with applications. Low RAM and slow HD made running a program of any size slow. I didn't even try to run a current Firefox. It would take 45 seconds to invoke, and was perceptibly slow once up. The version of Puppy I got bundled SeaMonkey 1.X as a combined browser/email/news reader application, as the smallest combination the developers could find. But it got left behind by advancing web standards and increasingly didn't work on major sites. I played with Chrome and Opera a bit, as smaller and faster invoking browsers, but they weren't what I'd call speedy. And network access, even connected by CAT5 cable to my router, was slow in Windows and Linux. Since actual work got done elsewhere and this was strictly an experiment, poor internet access wasn't a major concern.

The biggest oddity in Puppy was that it was explicitly single user, and you always ran as root. I learned Unix on multi-user machines running AT&T Unix System V Release 2, and always running as root gave me hives. But I understood the reason - it was explicitly a single user system, and if you did the wrong thing as root you only shot yourself in the foot.

And one way Puppy (and DSL, and TinyCore) achieved small size was through Busybox. Busybox bundled cut down versions of standard Linux commands into a single large executable, and installed symlinks to run the commands as "busybox <command> <parameters>" It worked, but I preferred the full versions, and would up copying a lot of them over from the Ubuntu install.

(One chap on the Puppy forums impressed me. He described getting a working Puppy install on an ancient Toshiba system with 16MB RAM, to use as a dedicated media server. To do it, he had to remove everything from Puppy that could be removed, and actually build the installation on a more powerful machine, then swap the HD with it into the Toshiba. He could not create it on the Toshiba. I shook my head in wonder.)

I tried installing Xubuntu. It installed and ran, but was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forum felt that Ubuntu had an increasingly powerful idea of what "low end" was, too much Gnome had crept into Xubuntu, and recommended what I did - wipe it and re-install from the Minimal CD. The Minimal CD was about 10MB, and installed a bare bones command line Linux system. Once it was up, you could use apt-get to cherry pick what you wanted. I chose Lxde as the lightest weight GUI with the features I wanted, and that brought along the Xorg framework needed to have a GUI.

Installed on an ext4 file system, Ubuntu was bearable, and actually supported current browsers, though the slow network access still bit.

I wound up spending most time in Ubuntu on the machine.

I finally gave up after a failed Ubuntu upgrade. A new major version came out. It required PAE support, and the p2110 didn't have it. The install went fine till it tried to install the new kernel. That failed because of no PAE support. When it rebooted, many things didn't work because it didn't have the new kernel. I wound up wiping the install and redoing my setup from scratch, stopping carefully before the problem version. Ubuntu got a nastygram from me, on the order of "If the release requires specific hardware support like PAE, it should check that exists as the first thing it does, and refuse to proceed if that prerequisite is lacking. It should not get to the tail end of the install, fail to install the required kernel, then go to hell in a bucket on reboot."

Well, the whole exercise was an experiment on a machine that wasn't critical, and I had some fun and learned some things, but I reached the point where there wasn't much else I could do and stopped fiddling. I haven't booted it in months and months.
______
Dennis

[Adoby]

One "strange" use of old laptops seems to be to use them as NAS boxes. Either just as NAS test benches or as a real NAS with a couple of big USB drives hanging from the USB ports. Just serving files on a network is pretty low-intensive work. Suitable for end-of-life hardware.

OMV (Open MediaVault, Debian with a web GUI for NAS services) is able to convert a very modest old box into a usable NAS.

I prefer to use tiny single board ARM computers, SBCs, as OMV NAS boxes. With huge HDDs. 2GB Odroid HC2s. Store and stream media, backup clients and run IoT stuff. They replaced my venerable 4 bay Synology 411j NAS.

One single Odroid HC2 with a 12 TB HDD was enough to replace the Synology NAS that had 4x4 TB HDDs. And with much better performance.