The Current Debian Desktop

The current situation on the T60, with its newest SSD drive, running Debian.
Damn if don't love this setup... Everything looks and feels amazing, even the again T60 seems kinda snappy, except for Chromium.

With a sort of look a like Xubuntu theme going on, but not really.
The theme on this one is CobiBird, as opposed to Greybird.

32 When I Want It

Well this is strange...
I was under the impression that Chrome doesn't run on 32 bits boxes...
On Linux you can't install Chrome on 32 bit, you have to make do running Chromium.

The Invaders Keep Retreating

And now the invaders are leaving Chromium...

As it was, before the update.

And after the update.

In the end, it'll hopefully look or go completely native soon.

Elbow Grease Chrome

Installed Chrome.
Yep, it all started more than a month ago.
Got fed up with the problems with Firefox, Chromium and Netflix, so, in the end, installed Chrome, were things have to work A Ok.
Followed the instructions (once again) given here: How to install Google Chrome in Linux Mint 18 and had to delete the file "/etc/apt/sources.list.d/chrome.list" after the installation, see the second comment.

I'm starting the program like this:

/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --disk-cache-dir=/tmp/cache-chrome %U

A Darker Chromium

Well, I've been using a bit of dark themes lately and one thing I've noticed is that Firefox -by default- sucks when it comes to handle dark themes.... Solution?
Try Chromium!
Specially Chromium with the Arc dark chrome theme.
Only thing that seems a bit unnerving is that the selected tab is the actually the darkest one, sometimes I might find a bit lost at to what tab I should click to.

Moving To a (New) New Musical House

Or, Youtube as Spotify's Replacement...
Since the newest version of Spotify's web player stubbornly refuses to scrobble to Last.fm, I've moved my online musical house -once again, fuck me in the gutter- to Youtube, which with the Last.fm Scrobbler extension, my music playing accountability obsession is more than satisfied, at least for the moment. Yes, all of this simply because I like to keep track of what I listen... What can I tell you... It was Grooveshark, then Rdio and now Spotify...

Yes, In The End It Was The DRM Route...

It must certainly was, so fuck me in the gutter...
Looks like Spotify finally caught up with that DRM thing, as well as the revamped website, with a more iOS like GUI, around here...
First it was in the US, but not here in Argentina, but now, it seems it is everywhere, dude...
And of course, like in the US, scrobbling to Last.fm doesn't work, so, yes, Sayonara Spotify!!!
As you can see, I can't live without my scrobbling, so sorry, and goodbye, I'll start downloading from Youtube the best themes and add those to my local music, it was good while it lasted, but given Last.fm scrobbles or Spotify, I take the scrobbling any given day!

Chromium's Cache on tmpfs

As part of the "Chrome migration", in order to use the newly acquired Chromecast, installed Chromium on my "new"Dell XPS.
Since the lappie uses a SSD, I've moved Chromium's cache to the system's tmpfs file system, actually the /tmp directory, which I have already set it up right from the get go.

The thing is pretty straight forward, since the lappie already has a working tmpfs, of course...
Matter of fact, all it takes is to launch the browser with a flag, which I added the option to the launch icon/ script on XFCE, the whole command looks like this:

chromium-browser --disk-cache-dir=/tmp/cache %U

Getting back to Chromium...

Actually, is more like getting back to Chrome, which I hate a lot, I'm a Firefox kinda guy and has been for the last couple of years...
But, due to the fact that I have to use my newly acquired Chromecast, Chrome is in more than in order, like a do or die situation...

These are the instructions to install it.

sudo su -
echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chrome.list
wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add -
apt-get update
apt-get install google-chrome-stable

This is on the X220... I'll have to switch to Chromium for my 32 bits boxes and lappies.

Testing CloudReady on a T43 & T60p

Yesterday installed CloudReady. (or actually wanted to) on my Thinkpad T43.
But before I get to that, I had to do a couple of things first to actually try to install it, or better yet, to actually create the USB boot drive from Neverware's CloudReady image.

I had to rename the downloaded bin file from "cloudready-free-43.1.37.bin" to "cloudready-free-43.1.37.bin.zip", the instructions on the PDF doc on their site mention that the file might be called either, on my case, it had to be called *.zip, otherwise it failed to create a proper USB boot drive, matter of fact, it failed to do anything.
It took the T43 about an hour and a half to actually make the USB boot drive from the finally renamed bin file.
After that I was able to boot from the USB drive, or actually not... On the Thinkpad T43 it simply failed, over and over and over, with a white screen with a countdown in the upper left corner, with a message and a spinning wheel:

Your system is repairing itself. Please wait.

After that, it rebooted by itself, and this repeated, over and over...

On the Thinkpad T60p things went much smoother, after only one of those cycles with the message "Your system is repairing itself. Please wait." it finally booted onto ChromiumOS.
Just for kicks, loaded a 250 GB SATA HDD on the T60p and installed the thing.

Installing the thing onto the T60p -after all the warning messages that you were about to destroy the data on your drive if you proceed- took about 30 minutes, and no surprises whatsoever.
The WiFi worked Ok (wasn't able to find a way to setup a fixed IP address, tho), the LCD resolution worked (1600x1200), etc.
Anyways, I think I'm not gonna keep that OS for the moment, this is just a test, it seems nice and all, but I don't see any improvement in terms of snappiness compared to the same T60p running Linux Mint XFCE.

Chromium password management hell

Yesterday's Chromium updates seem to really, really fucked thing up on my setup...
Chromium is driving me crazy with the user/ password prompt.
Not only wiped every single password I had stored, but also is offering to store (or not) every single page that has authentication, and of course, it is not storing nor the preference not to save the password, but also fails to store the password if I choose to type it.
And yes, I am aware of the way that Chrome/ Chromium used to store passwords, that is -among other reasons- why I have an encrypted $HOME.

Flash out of date on Chromium

So, you finish installing Linux Mint (MATE and the 32 bits version on my case), you download, install all the updates and then reboot your box, start your Chromium and you get the annoying message:

"Adobe Flash Player was blocked because it is out of date"

And of course, Flash fails to execute.

So, in order to fix this I've downloaded the latest Flash release following the link on the page, and then select ".tar.gz for other Linux", and then untar it:

tar zxf install_flash_player_11_linux_i386.tar.gz

Then, make a backup of the original Flash object already installed on the system:

cd /opt/mint-flashplugin-11
sudo cp libflashplayer.so libflashplayer.so.ORIG

Then copy the new one from the untarred directory over the original one:

sudo cp libflashplayer.so /opt/mint-flashplugin-11/

Then restart Chromium and everything will be kosher with Flash.

There is this link: Fix: Linux Mint Adobe Flash Player was blocked because it is out date but I found the instructions a bit unclear, so I'm posting this as well.

Chromium closes all open tabs

These last few days I've been using Usul (with Ubuntu GNOME Shell Remix) a lot, like all the time, specially now with the maxxed RAM.
Trying to use Chromium as my day to day browser too, so now becomes really important to correct that BS about closing all open tabs when the main window is closed.
Extensions to the rescue!
Another extension, or add on, that I now find essential on Chromium:

Window Close Protector

Chromium: reverse the controls

On Gnome 3, using Chromium with the option Hide system title bar and use compact borders and the option Use Classic Theme the window controls get reversed and set to the left of the window.

gconftool /apps/metacity/general/button_layout -t string -s "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

This puts things in order, and of course the change is instantaneous and doesn't need a logout or reboot.

Chromium: No drop shadows for you!!

Started using Chromium (again) during this weekend, and I just noticed this glitch...

What a hell is going on?

Giving Chromium (another) chance

That is, another chance in Linux, when I use Windows Chrome is the only browser I use.
So installed it today, mostly to use it side by side with Firefox.
This are a couple of add ons I install right after the browser is up & running.

Download YouTube Videos as MP4
AdBlock

Unwanted Ubuntu crud (4)

Actually, this not unwanted, but, is a left over, and since the idea of these is getting rid of stuff that uses HDD space, SSD space that is; this one does.
If you removed Chromium from your system, check for this two directories:

~/.cache/chromium
~/.config/chromium/

These two dirs were using about 125 MB of HDD space, and that only after a very short Chromium usage.
I've tested Chromium a bit, and even tho it looks rather nice, it is not my cup of tea, I'm too used to Firefox by now...

Cobalt Thorium G

Been playing a bit with Chrome lately, specifically with Chromium.
Of course is fast, and it looks rather sexy out of the box, at least is you like the current fad on minimalism.

The only thing that really, really sucks g0at dick is that it lacks support that will allow it to permanently accept a self signed cert... We use them a lot at work.