Browser Previews

Firefox 3.1 (which will likely become 3.5 in Firefox’s grand chaotic numbering scheme) beta 3 and Seamonkey 2.0 alpha 3 were both released recently. I like the progress of Seamonkey, particularly the way you can actually customize the behavior of the URL bar so that it doesn’t necessarily act like Firefox’s “Awesomebar” in the way it searches for things. Both are really nice, though, and even though I still prefer Seamonkey, Firefox is a very good choice and works great.

Though, in Linux, an odd thing is happening in both.

Except for a few very rare cases, I despise “event sounds”, sounds that occur whenever something is happening. Stock Windows is the worst at this, giving events to popups, IE and Explorer navigation, and pretty much anything that happens, ever, gets some annoying little sound. Fortunately, you can turn them off.

KDE and Gnome in Linux, too, behave this way, but not quite so annoying, even by default. Still, turning the beeps and dings off is one of the first things I customize on either when I decide to use them, and since I’m on a quite advanced system with tons of RAM and a lot of ways to plug in devices, I decided to brave KDE to take advantage of some of its automation. Normally I despise any sort of automation, but I figured I’d give it a chance.

In both Firefox 3.1 beta 3 and Seamonkey 2.0alpha3, though, any time a popup “alert” (from Javascript or otherwise, e.g. the box that comes up in Seamonkey telling me what I pasted in wasn’t a valid URL), a sound effect happens. I’ve noticed there are, in fact, two — a single drum beat sound and a fast series of drum beats, which is in fact the one that Gnome (GDM) sounds when the login screen shows up in Ubuntu. And nothing — NOTHING — I do or try will turn it off. There are no preferences in the browsers themselves, all of KDE’s sounds are off, launching the Gnome sound manager from KDE shows that all the sounds are off there, and so on.

And worse, these events do not generate noises in other browsers, even Firefox 3.0.x (the latest stable Firefox).

Something is telling me that there is something within these new browsers that are hooking up to something, somewhere, and generating noises that it should not be doing. I haven’t gotten to the bottom of it, but until I do, it’s really, really annoying me.

Update: I tracked down the cause of this; apparently the new browser releases use GTK’s setting to determine whether or not to play a sound. Specifically, it looks for gtk-enable-event-sounds, and if it’s false (set to 0), it won’t play the sounds. So if you have this problem, create or open ~/.gtkrc-2.0 (or ~/.gtkrc-2.0-kde-kde4 or a similar filename if you’re using KDE and it manages GTK apps) and add the following line:
gtk-enable-event-sounds=0

Restart the browser and those stupid sounds will stop.

Return of the Me

Oh man, what a fun time.

So after dealing with a terribly slow PC after my just somewhat slow PC died a few months back, I finally found a semi-cheap PC to replace it. It’s certainly not a monster of a PC, but it runs pretty much everything I want it to just fine. Sadly, getting Linux to run on it has been an absolute chore.

First, this thing came preinstalled with Windows Vista, which isn’t the best OS in the world, I can tell you. Still, on this computer with 4GB of RAM and a quad core Phenom, it at least runs okay. The issue is that being a modern off-the-shelf PC, it did not come with an actual installer CD for the OS. It instead comes with a sort of “restore from scratch” boot function, using a custom partition with images of everything from scratch. This unfortunately means that I have to throw everything onto one massive C drive instead of reinstalling plain Vista on a smaller partition… unless, of course, I could use gparted to shrink that partition.

Trying that turned out to be a horrible idea.

Running gparted was successful; however, rebooting put me on a “repairing Vista” screen that just sat there for hours with no disk activity save for about 5 minutes at the beginning of the process. Trying to fix it from a Linux boot CD was unsuccessful as well, and every boot after that threw me back to the unfortunate uncancellable “repairing Vista” screen.

So I activated the repair mode at boot, and hoped against hope that the repair would use the existing resized partition, at least (and would somehow fix that partition as well). No luck, though — the repair truly took the system back to its initial state, with Vista installed on a partition that filled the entire drive. So at that point, I was somewhat stuck. My only real option was to try Ubuntu’s Wubi installer to give me a Linux partition inside Windows. Its max size being only 30GB was kind of a downer, but undeterred, I pressed on.

It worked, and Ubuntu seemed to have everything working just fine, including sound and 3d. Disliking Gnome, however, meant that I had to do some serious tweaking. This is when new trouble began.

I changed the oddly minimalist xorg.conf file to use a smaller screen than the nearly unreadable default of 1600×1200 (on my monitor, and especially with my aging eyes) and the proper refresh rates for my monitor. When I started X, however, the screen didn’t fill the monitor size, it was stuck at 60Hz, and I had no 3d. Trying to fix it, I eventually screwed things up bad enough where X wouldn’t even start. It was time to remove Ubuntu and start anew.

After reinstalling, I was more careful to not change anything that was not necessary, but unfortunately the same result happened. A search of Google, as before, was mostly unenlightening as to the exact cause, though I had seen some hints to some configurations not working with Ubuntu’s provided drivers. I had thought nothing of that, since, when Gnome and gdm was running by default, things were working just fine.

So for the heck of it, I removed xorg-driver-fglrx, installed the kernel headers, and — and as I removed xorg-driver-fglrx I noticed apt recommended I remove some other “unneeded” things as well, including an unknown package called dkms. Looking at the specifics, it was apparently something to help automate driver detection for Ubuntu. Knowing that would probably be a thorn in my side for where I was heading, that got removed as well.

Running off to ATI’s site for drivers, I got the latest ones for my Radeon and ran them. Without even having to change my xorg.conf configuration that I had tweaked to a much more traditional format during my trials with Ubuntu’s fglrx driver, startx now brought up a working, 3d-enabled screen. Finally.

No sound, however, but that was easily fixed by adding my user to the audio group. One has to wonder what kind of voodoo magic Ubuntu does behind the scenes to set all of this up. It boggles my mind at how much modern Linux distros automate just to save people from a few simple configuration edits.

So now that I’m back in business, I seriously hope to get back to this blogging thing here. There’s not much to talk about when you’re using Debian on an ancient, crippled, nearly useless computer.