Better Flash Compatibility for 64-bit Linux

It's pretty easy to install Adobe Flash in Ubuntu, but unfortunately the version that's used by default has some bugs on 64-bit systems and crashes often (at least on my system). The problem is that Adobe hasn't officially released a 64-bit version of the plugin for Linux, and something called NSPluginWrapper has to be used to get it to play nice.

Fortunately, Adobe has been working on a 64-bit version for some time, and you can get the pre-release at their Adobe Labs site. The trick is to replace the old implementation with this one. Below is a little script that will do it all for you. Follow along and run the commands manually, or save it and run as root (no arguments required).

#!/bin/bash

# This URL points to the most current version of the plugin as of 8/20/2009. Check the link at the bottom of http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html for the latest version and replace it here.
PLUGIN_URL=http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
PLUGIN_DIR=/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins

if [ "`whoami`" != "root" ]; then
 echo "You must run this script as root (sudo). Nothing will be done."
 exit
fi

# First, we must remove the default flash plugin if its already installed.
# If you installed the plugin manually make sure you remove it manually prior to running this script. You can do this by deleting it from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
echo "Removing old Flash plugins..."
echo "-----------------------------"
apt-get --assume-yes --quiet remove flashplugin-nonfree flashplugin-installer
echo "-----------------------------"

# Now lets download and extract the plugin to the correct location in one fell swoop.
echo "Downloading and installing plugin..."
echo "-----------------------------"
wget --output-document=- $PLUGIN_URL | tar --extract --gunzip --directory $PLUGIN_DIR
echo "-----------------------------"

echo "Please restart all instances of Firefox for changes to take effect."

If you decide to install a different version of flash, remember to delete this plugin. Simply remove /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so.

Waste Less Space in Firefox

Screen real estate is expensive, especially vertical real estate on today's widescreen monitors. I've been trying to stick with 4:3 because they let met see those extra few lines of code or text. Anyway, all of the different toolbars on todays browsers, especially Firefox really bug me.

First, lets take a look at what I mean. Below is what Firefox looks like by default. There is plenty of space by the menu, but the Bookmarks Toolbar is hanging out all by itself (in red):

First, lets get into UI customization mode. In the menu go to View->Toolbars->Customize... and you'll notice a dialog called "Customize Toolbar" come up. Don't worry, we don't actually have to deal with it:

Now we can drag the bookmarks where we want them:
And finally, lets get rid of the now empty Bookmarks Toolbar. Right click on where your bookmarks used to be, and uncheck "Bookmarks Toolbar":
Now we can close the "Customize Toolbar" dialog and see our results:
Yay, more space! You can do something similar in Internet Explorer, but I'll leave that to you to figure out. In fact, you can even rearrange the buttons and location bar in Windows Explorer to save space when you're looking through your files.

Firefox Addons for Prism

If you havent tried Mozilla's Prism yet, I suggest you do. Basically it lets you run webapps more like a desktop application instead of having to run it in your browser that's already cluttered with a ton of tabs. I have stuff I use often like Gmail, Facebook, and VMware Server Console set up as Prism webapps and I find it alot easier to get to them instead of having to open my Firefox window and then wade through a bunch of tabs.

Unfortunately, Prism currently doesnt support FF addons (extensions) yet, but luckily will in the future. However, most addons should just work since both FF and Prism are based on the same subsystems. So...lets go ahead and fool Prism!

First, download the addon .XPI file. This file is really a .ZIP, so feel free to rename it or just open it with your favorate archive viewer. Inside you should find a file named install.rdf. This is where all the magic happens as it defines the target application for the addon. Open the file in a text editor and you should see something like this:

<em:targetapplication>
 <!-- Firefox -->
 <description>
  <em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
  <em:minversion>3.0a1</em:minversion>
  <em:maxversion>3.0.*</em:maxversion>
 </description>
</em:targetapplication>

The two lines that conserve us are the em:id, and versions. Prism checks these values to make sure they match to what it expects. If it doesnt it tells you to go away! After digging around a bit I found the values that are needed for Prism:

<em:targetapplication>
 <!-- Prism -->
 <description>
  <em:id>prism@developer.mozilla.org</em:id>
  <em:minversion>0.4</em:minversion>
  <em:maxversion>1.0.0.*</em:maxversion>
 </description>
</em:targetapplication>

You can have more than one targetApplication tag, so just add the above right after the one for Firefox in your addon and you're all set!

If you're not sure how to do the above, or are just lazy you can use the script below to convert the .XPI automatically! Unfortunately this will only work on linux so Windows and Mac people will have to stick to the instructions above.

#!/bin/bash
xpiFile=$1
tempDir=`mktemp -d`
tempZipFile=`mktemp`
tempRdfFile=`mktemp`

function cleanup {
 # get rid of temporary working files
 rm -rf $tempDir $tempZipFile $tempRdfFile > /dev/null
}

# make sure the XPI exists
if [ ! -e "$xpiFile" ]; then
 echo "$xpiFile does not exist"
 cleanup
 exit
fi

# extract the files from the original package
unzip -d $tempDir $xpiFile > /dev/null

# make sure what you need is there
installRdfFile="$tempDir/install.rdf"
if grep -q "prism@developer.mozilla.org" $installRdfFile; then
 echo "$xpiFile is already compatible with Prism, doing nothing"
 cleanup
 exit
fi

# replace stuff
sed "s_<em:targetApplication>_\
<em:targetApplication>\
 <!-- Prism -->\
 <Description>\
  <em:id>prism@developer.mozilla.org</em:id>\
  <em:minVersion>0.4</em:minVersion>\
  <em:maxVersion>1.0.0.*</em:maxVersion>\
 </Description>\
</em:targetApplication>\
&_" < $installRdfFile > $tempRdfFile
mv $tempRdfFile $installRdfFile

# rebuild the package
pushd $tempDir > /dev/null
rm $tempZipFile # i just needed the name, not the actual file
zip -r $tempZipFile * > /dev/null
popd > /dev/null
mv $tempZipFile $xpiFile

cleanup

Just save the below as mkPrismXpi.sh, make it executable, and run it as such:

./mkPrismXpi.sh myAddon.xpi