Firefox 3 Beta 3

As I write this, I'm on the third beta of Firefox 3. And I must say, so far it seems awesome.

Improvements are legion. First off, it would appear that I was mistaken earlier and it was either not difficult for Mozilla to implement native Linux theme support, or they deemed the investment worthwhile. I'm currently looking at my default KDE icons straight in the face, so I guess they met that goal on all three platforms. Kudos.

Firefox feels faster. I don't know how much of this is the placebo effect but the whole pages seem to be loading quicker. I've yet to really stress-test beta 3 -- as in, have 20 tabs open for an hour or two -- but early reports are that Firefox 3 doesn't leak memory as much, and so shouldn't slow down over time to the extent its predecessor did.

Probably my favorite improvement though, is that now when my mouse hovers over the latest xkcd, Firefox no longer cuts off the long strings of title text that accompany the comic.

KDE Trash + Kmenu in AWN (ugly, ugly hacks)

Some day, I want to be free of kicker and rely solely on Avant Window Navigator to manage my various programs. Unfortunately, AWN is very Gnome-centric: it has a main menu plug-in and a trash plug-in, but both are Gnome-only. Fortunately, there's a way to get a similar effect on KDE -- kinda.

NOTE: FOLLOWING THE INSTRUCTIONS FOR MODIFYING THE TRASH PLUG-IN WILL LIKELY DESTROY A GNOME INSTALL. ONLY USE IT IF YOU USE KDE EXCLUSIVELY, AND HAVE NO DESIRE TO USE GNOME.

Firstly, the trash. AWN's trash plug-in looks for Trash in a different folder from KDE, so we have to change where it looks. First, remove the old Trash folder:

mv ~/.Trash ~/.Trash_old

Now, create a link so the Gnome trash folder points to the KDE trash folder:

ln -s ~/.local/share/Trash/files ~/.Trash

We have to edit Nautilus, the Gnome file manager, so that it will load KDE the way we want when we tell the trash applet to open the trash folder. So back up nautilus, and then open it as root:

sudo mv /usr/bin/nautilus /usr/bin/nautilus.old

sudo kwrite /usr/bin/nautilus

Now, replace whatever's in that file with the following:

#!/bin/sh
#
# /usr/bin/nautilus
#
# Avant Window Navigator Trash Aplet Hack for KDE
#
# Copyleft 2007 A. Tres Finocchiaro
#
# This script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
# License as published by the Free Software Foundation

if [ "$1" = "trash:" ]; then
exec konqueror "$@/"
else
exec konqueror "$@"
fi

exit 0

Save, and you're done. AWN's trash applet now works with KDE.

Now, the menu "hack" is much less tightly integrated. Right-click AWN, select preferences, select launchers and click the add button. Call the command anything you like, and give it whatever icon suits your fancy. Now, make sure the command reads:

dcop kicker kicker popupKMenu 0

Add it to the AWN launch bar however you like. Now, hide kicker by opening up kcontrol and going to Desktop, then Panels, and finally the hiding tab. Select hide automatically. Now you have a button on your dock that will launch the kmenu.