So there is this Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.1 machine I have. I do not have administrative rights on it. Albeit for a good reason, it makes life very inconvenient. Especially as compared to this another Ubuntu/Debian machine where I have full access.

RHEL 6.1 comes with tools that are, well, dated. So I tend to install the later versions of tools I use regularly. Some of the easy ones include Firefox, Thunderbird, gPodder and Adobe Reader. These are easy, because the vendors provide simple ‘tar.gz’ packages that I can just inflate and use.

Then there are applications like Pidgin, XMMS2 and re-alpine which can be easily compiled from source.

And then there are applications like Google Chrome and LibreOffice which I always want to install. But since they come in RPM packages, installing them without root privileges is next to impossible… or so I thought.

Chrome

Until recently I was using Chris Staite’s Chromium build. It works well, only it was stuck at version 14.

So I decided to try my luck and inflate the official Google Chrome RPM. So I did the following:

This creates a directory structure under /one/of/my/dirs with chrome installed at /one/of/my/dirs/sys/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome.

Now, either this process is supposed to work, or I was incredibly lucky. But once I pointed LD_LIBRARY_PATH appropriately, chrome launches and works fine! Here’s the launcher I use:

Chrome requires that the chrome-sandbox binary in the Chrome installation directory be installed as root. In my case, this is not the case. So Chrome refuses to launch with sandbox enabled. That is the reason for the --no-sandbox. Obviously, there are security repercussions, and Chrome warns you about that every time it is launched.

LibreOffice

This success in installation of Chrome totally boosted my confidence! So I decided to take a stab at that other application that I always wanted to be up-to-date – LibreOffice. Turns out it is easier than Chrome!

All it takes is downloading the right RPMS and inflating them into the same /one/of/my/dirs directory!

And that is it, LibreOffice is installed at /one/of/my/dirs/sys/opt/libreoffice3.4/program/soffice!

Like I said, I am not sure this process is supposed to work, but it did beautifully in my case!

I am seeking testing and feedback on a new version of Empty’ em. There are some implementation changes that I would like to test on multiple platforms and different versions of Thunderbird before submitting on AMO. Following is the summary of changes:

• Moved to using Inline Options. This requires version 7.* or greater. On older versions, old preferences should work
• Added a preference to disable the notification that appears after all configured folders have been emptied
• Optimization change: Remove the folder listener that was added to track folders being emptied. No functional change, just makes the add-on a good citizen by not consuming resources when it is not active

You can provide feedback at:

Empty ‘em 0.80 testing Google Docs form

Here’s what the inline options look like:

Empty ‘em Inline Options – Click for full size

Cheers!

Automator is a handy application in Mac OS X. It makes your everyday, repetitive tasks more efficient by chaining operations exported by variety of applications. It automates something you would manually do using multiple applications.

Recently I was introduced to ifttt – short for if this then that. In their own words, like ‘lift’ without the ‘l’. To me, this is an awesome tool! It provides an Automator like way of chaining actions provided by multiple web services, called channels, to create a workflow, or Task. Automating something I would manually do using multiple websites. The Tasks are set rolling on Triggers that are also defined for individual web service.

They also have hundreds of pre-canned tasks called Recipes that you can readily use.

I won’t make this a help page about ifttt. You should visit http://ifttt.com/wtf, read all about it, and start being efficient on the web.

ifttt filter that should push this post to Tumblr and Posterous when this feed is updated. Let’s see! – Click for full size

If everything goes well, ifttt should post this blog post on my Tumblr and Posterous. If not, I probably need more reading and tweaking to do!

After a long, long while, finally got some time to update many parts of mahesha.com that were on my to-do list.

Blog Theme

Thanks to the good guys at Obox Design my blog at tech.mahesha.com (this blog) has a new, clean theme that I really like. I hope everything is setup correctly. Some broken links, etc. are expected. But I should be able to clean that up in the coming few days.

Home Page

Home page at mahesha.com is completely refreshed. I’ve been working on this for a while now. It is still kind of a work in progress, but I think it is ready enough to be made live.

Favicon

This is a minor change. The favicon that I use on most of my sites, which is also my avatar on many sites, is pretty old. I created it it many moons ago when I had a Mac, with Photoshop installed. I have, since, moved to using Linux and open source software for most of my computational needs. As such, I always wanted to recreate the image using GIMP. I finally got to doing it. And as a starting point, I am updating the favicons on the home page and the blog to use the newly created image. Soon I’ll update favicons and avatars on other sites too.

Authorship

While I am at updating the blog theme, I though I’d implement the Authorship mechanism that Google recently launched. With a excellent instructions at from various sources, I have tried to implement rel=author. I will be eager to see if the effects show in search results in the coming few days.

WordPress 3.2

It has become almost a weekly exercise, but this blog is also updated to the latest WordPress 3.2. I hope it stays current for at least some weeks.

Cheers for now!

Oh, by the way, you can find me on Google+!

I just uploaded Empty ‘em version 0.781 to addons.mozilla.org. The add-on now supports Thunderbird version 3.3a4pre. You can alternatively get it from GitHub downloads:

https://github.com/downloads/asolkar/emptyem/emptyem-0.781.xpi

It should appear on AMO listing shortly.

I will not be working on the add-on at least for a month, since I am traveling.

Recently, Mozilla made it mandatory that each add-on hosted on AMO (addons.mozilla.org) be reviewed. To comply, I had to upload the latest version of my Thunderbird addon – Empty ‘em to AMO.

As pointed in my earlier post, I was not so much for it, since AMO wouldn’t allow a coarser control on maxVersion of the add-on.

But in any case, Empty ‘em is now reviewed and available from AMO:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/empty-em/

If you notice, the add-on is still marked experimental. This is because I only did a preliminary review of the add-on. I’ll wait until I get some more user feedback until I request a full review – after which, the add-on will come out of its experimental phase.

Empty ‘em now has automatic updates

On the positive side though, the add-on will get automatic updates. And I’ve also seen increased number of downloads in the past few days. I guess it always hurts to be in the search results on AMO.

As usual, for support on the add-on, head to the Empty ‘em Support Group.

I am making version 0.76 of Empty ‘em – my Thunderbird add-on – available on GitHub at:

https://github.com/downloads/asolkar/emptyem/emptyem-0.76.xpi

Only change in this version is that maxVersion of Thunderbird is bumped to 3.3a* – so it installs on latest nightly builds from the comm-central branch.

I am not updating the add-on on the addons.mozilla.org (AMO) since it does not allow maxVersion to be 3.3a*. Which means that I will have to update the add-on on AMO for every alpha release. I’d rather release it now for all alphas, later for all betas and eventually for the final release of Thunderbird 3.3.

I’ve been using Empty ‘em on 3.3a* versions of Thunderbird for a while now. It seems to be working fine. Then again, I’ve only tested it with Gmail(IMAP) and MS Exchange (IMAP) accounts.

Empty ‘em 0.76 in Thunderbird 3.3a (Shredder)

Take it for a spin and let me know of any issues on the Empty ‘em Support Group.

I almost do not have a printer at home – I have an old one, but I use it so rarely, the cartridges are always dry. So when I need to print something, I usually print it to a file on my Linux laptop – a .pdf file. Then take that file to work/FedEx Kinko’s – via Google Docs/Dropbox/other cloud service/USB drive – and print it. I am sure there are many who do that.

Also for archiving online transactions, like bank transfers, purchase acknowledgements, etc. – when you don’t necessarily need a print out, but just want some kind of a digital confirmation you could print later if needed – ‘print to file’ is such a convenient feature to have.

Just wondering why Chrome OS got rid of the print to file feature of the underlying Linux OS? Google cloud print is cool and all, but if you don’t have a Windows PC with a printer connected, you are really out of luck. Am I missing something, or Chrome OS indeed does not have a print to file option?

It’s been exciting few days playing with Cr-48 – the new Google Chrome OS laptop. I’ve been playing with it, trying out various features, doing my usual browsing, some development even. I must say I have not felt very restricted yet. But it’s been only a few days.

From the past few days’ use, here’s my impression about the Cr-48.

The Hardware

Anyone interested in Cr-48 has already seen many pictures and read about its hardware. I am going to write about only the points that I thought were significant.

Pros:

• The 12.1in screen is just right for casual web browsing. I find the resolution optimal.
• Keyboard – even with missing function and caps-lock keys – is nice and big. Keys feel good to the fingers when typing.
• Battery life is amazing! I haven’t drained it completely yet, but I won’t be surprised if I get 9+ hours
• Doesn’t look like this thing heats at all. Even after many hours of use, it barely gets warm. This is so much better than the Sony Vaio VGN-T140P I use currently

Cons:

• Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N455 @ 1.66GHz (1 core, 2 threads, integrated graphics) seems to fall short, in my opinion. Especially when playing videos. From what I found, YouTube does not offer HD videos (480p+) when accessed from Cr-48. If I play an HD video on Vimeo, it is choppy as hell. Intel touts HD performance of their integrated graphics, so I was a bit disappointed there
• I may be still getting used to it, but the touchpad is not quite there yet. It supports 2-finger scrolling, it is big, nice and sensitive. But I think it may be a bit too big and sensitive. While typing, I invariably touch/tap it causing unintended things to happen.

Some detailed hardware info, for the curious:

If you can’t see the embedded Gist, head to GitHub

I got this from chrome://system/.

The Software

Chrome OS has evolved very well. I played with it a bit in VirtualBox when it was initially announced about a year ago. But the user experience of Chrome OS on Cr-48 is a totally different thing – it is much better.

Like I mentioned, I don’t feel restricted at all when it comes to casual browsing – news, social networking, blogging, shopping etc. Watching videos was not very pleasant, but I think it should get better with better hardware (or drivers?).

There is not a lot of scope for local development. But if you have a remote machine, where you could ssh and do some development, that is sure possible. I did not try starting an X-application on the remote host, but I did some terminal stuff – editing PHP/HTML/JS/CSS in Vim. Here’s what I found. ALT+CTRL+t takes you to a terminal – a tty. It starts a shell called crosh. If you type help it shows all the commands it supports. ssh is one of them. Once you are in the ssh session, you can do pretty much anything you do in a terminal – on the remote host. You can start multiple terminals with ALT+CTRL+t. You can circle through terminals and the browser with the next tab button.

Much More to Come

There are a lot of things I haven’t tried yet – local storage (which seems like a 16GB SSD), external memory (USB/SD card), VGA connection to the TV/monitor, other peripherals via USB, etc.

When it comes to consuming shared content, Chrome OS has not issues. But I am curious to know how easy/difficult will it be to share content with Chrome OS. I’ll find out when I share my next set of pictures.

I’ve kept my 100MBs of December data from Verizon Wireless for later in the month, when I’ll be away from home. So I am not sure how the 3G connectivity works. WiFi has been very stable and was easy to configure.

I’ll post more as I find out.

So, at the moment, I think the Cr-48 is a neat device. Will I buy it? It depends on the price point. For now the price is free, so I am loving every bit of it. In my opinion, commercial Chrome OS devices will have to be cheaper than the cheapest netbooks out there to fly. Even better, subsidized by wireless carriers like Verizon – hopefully not with service contracts.

Until later, Cheers!