Firefox and Dropbox syncronization for Bookmarks and Passwords

After upgrading from Mozilla FireFox 3.0 to 3.5 I tried Mozilla Weave for syncing my bookmarks and passwords in all my computers. I was using version 0.8 (1.0b1 is out now), but despite working more or less, most of my bookmarks where misplaced, put out of order, moved to unsorted bookmarks… a mess. Tiding up the bookmarks on one browser doesn’t mean that it would be ok on another, so after only 5 days of use, I thought that there is probably a better solution, and I found it.

The solution is to use Dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTE1NTQzMTA5, the FireFox Addon SyncPlaces: http://www.andyhalford.com/syncplaces/ for syncronizing bookmarks and passwords. It works as it should. It doesn’t mess with Bookmarks, the order is kept, Icons are kept, and passwords are synchronized without any issue.

So, what are the steps:

- Install Dropbox and create an account.

- Install the Syncplaces add-on for Firefox

- Create a directory for storing Firefox information on your Dropbox folder, for example: mkdir ~/Dropbox/Firefox

- On your Firefox menu, goto Bookmarks->Syncplaces->options

- Select the Server tab and then select on the Connection sub-tab, the protocol File

- Select now the Syncronization tab, and define the path for the files: prefix the suggested name with /home/primalcortex/Dropbox/Firefox. So it should look like

JSON PATH: /home/primalcortex/Dropbox/Firefox/syncplaces.json

If you want, you can output also in HTML and XBEL format. Use the same path for the files.

- For synchronizing passwords select the checkbox passwords, and input a strong password. The password path is like the previous ones: /home/primalcortex/Dropbox/Firefox/passwords

You’re set. So down on the FireFox status bar, there is now an icon with a blue and red lines/circles, right click on it and select Send Bookmarks/passwords. Make sure that on the Dropbox Firefox folder files where created. Now DropBox synchronizes these files into the “cloud”, and they are available to your other Dropbox computers.

On the other computers, just repeat the configuration process (Install Dropbox, SyncPlaces, same configuration) but this time select on those computers on the SyncPlaces icon, the Receive Bookmarks/passwords option. (Make sure that you use the same password for the password export/impor feature in all computers).

Voilá, full no fuss workable synchronization! You just decide now which is the master machine, if you want to, namely by tweaking the merge options of the Syncplaces Addon. Also to avoid bookmarks duplication, I recommend that the BookmarkDD addon at http://bookmarkdd.mozdev.org/installation.html be installed and set not to do pop-ups when duplicated bookmarks are found. This way, during import, no duplicate bookmarks are imported.

Now you can automate the synchronization process by just configuring Syncplaces to synchronize at a specific time, or periodically/automatically and your set.

Vmware 6.5.3 on Karmic Koala

Installing: At least these instructions worked for me:

#sudo bash
#chmod +x VMware-Workstation-6.5.3-185404.x86_64.bundle
# export VMWARE_SKIP_MODULES=true
#./VMware-Workstation-6.5.3-185404.x86_64.bundle
# vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

Voilá, installed Vmware without any issue. I’ve compiled the modules after installation because there are reports that it may hang by using the installer. Not sure, because I didn’t tried it. All VM Machines appear to be working.
Now for the other issues:

After upgrading from Kubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, I needed to upgrade to Vmware Workstation 6.5.3 as is the subject of this post… My previous version was 6.5.0. With this upgrade some older issues where back and new issues appeared…

- Keyboard mapping where again all wrong, with my Portuguese keyboard wrongly configured and some keys wouldn’t just work.

- The other annoying issue was the grab/ungrab mouse cursor problem. Kubuntu task bar area and the floating vmware toolbar area where unusable when the VM machines are in full screen. So for example the Windows task bar is, when the machine is full screen, at the same screen area than the KDE taskbar. The cursor on this area just flickered away like mad, and it was pretty difficult to do anything on this area. This also mean that Windows taskbar and systray where almost unusable and unacessible, and just couldn’t do anything on this area. The temporary workaround was to use machines not in full screen…
The solutions:
For the keyboard problem, on my home directory, just went to .vmware hidden directory (create one if it doesn’t exist) and add the following to the file named config:

xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true
xkeymap.keycode.61 = 0x035
xkeymap.keycode.61 = 0x5f
xkeymap.keycode.47 = 0x027
xkeymap.keycode.47 = 0xc7
xkeymap.keycode.48 = 0x028
xkeymap.keycode.48 = 0xaa
xkeymap.keycode.51 = 0x02b
xkeymap.keycode.51 = 0xfe52
xkeymap.keycode.34 = 0x01a # +
xkeymap.keycode.34 = 0x2a # *
xkeymap.keycode.35 = 0x01b # ´
xkeymap.keycode.35 = 0xfe50 # `
xkeymap.keycode.20 = 0x00c # ‘
xkeymap.keycode.20 = 0x3f # ?
xkeymap.keycode.21 = 0xab # «
xkeymap.keycode.21 = 0xbb # »
xkeymap.keycode.49 = 0x029 # \
xkeymap.keycode.49 = 0x056 # |

xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

Now if you copy and past the above content, just make sure that x is an ‘x’ letter, because WordPress may change it to something else that looks like an x but it isn’t. If you don’t due this, when you press a mapped key on VMware, you will get a popup window with an error complaining about a key code.
For the mouse issue, it looks like that the solution is this:
Temporary fix (solution from http://communities.vmware.com/thread/240766):

Open a shell window and start vmware from it with as follow:

#export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes

#export LD_PRELOAD=/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0

#vmware

It seems that to make the first two lines permanent, you just, as root, edit the following file: /etc/vmware/bootstrap and add the first to lines to the end of the file.
I hope that all issues are covered now….

Phase 1: Upgrade my work computer from Kubuntu 9.04 to 9.10

Today at work I had a lot of documentation to read, so, why wait, lets upgrade my Kubuntu 9.04 running on an HP nx9420 portable computer to the latest Karmic Koala release, while I slip through documentation…

Upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04 on this computer was a bit of a pain, mainly because I was already running KDE 4, so at the end of the upgrade I was without any graphic environment installed and working… but everything was solved by accessing the console and installing manually KDE 4 again.

Upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04 I was also bitten by the drop of support of ATI for this HP graphic card an X1600, so I ended up with the open source drivers, and some problems that I didn’t had with ATI proprietary drivers: screen corruption on refresh of some application areas (pretty annoying), crash on street view on google earth, vmware console missing buttons, to name a few. At the begining I had also a lot of crashes related to screen activity, but upgrading to the tormod ATI driver, solved most of the crashs, but other issues still remained.

So, I was expecting some problems upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10 this time, but the upgrade mostly went well, except one minor detail: menu.lst for grub was not updated with the latest kernel, so after booting up, and logging in I ended up with a garbage full screen and an unusable desktop… going to a session console and back again restored the desktop screen but everything was too slow. So I corrected the Grub configuration to use the correct kernel, and things started much better:

- Boot time: way faster on 9.10 than on 9.04

- Screen appearance and fonts seem more streamlined and better. I think my screen real estate is now better used.

The bad news: My company provided vmware workstation stopped working on kernel 2.6.31… The vmware modules are unable to compile, so I’ll have to download version 6.5.3 and see how it goes. (Edit: using VMware Workstation 6.5.3, does work)

I’ll have to do further tests so see if at least the ati driver issues are better, and also to see if I don’t have any new issues.

Anyway, one of the things that happened is that 9.10 uses Firefox 3.5, and I was using 3.0… Some plugins that I had on 3.0 stopped working on 3.5, namely switchproxy tool and fxinfo… The good news is that now I can use Mozilla Weave… yeay!

On my home computer, I’ve also upgraded firefox, but due to the issue with vmware, I’ll see if I can fix it before upgrading this one… also I have an ATI 4870, so I’ll wait a bit more before jumping…

Canon HF200 on Linux/Kubuntu 9.04

Being an 100% Linux user, the software shipped with Canon HF200 is not useful for me because it’s Windows only. Anyway, I’ve tried Pixela Software, the shipped software  on a virtual machine, and I wasn’t convinced…

So far  on Linux there is a complete lack of tools for management the video files that are produced by this camera, namely the MTS file format, despite being able to play them with no problems, only with small quirks… Right now I’m using VLC, and the x.264 codec downloaded from the sources, not the one shipped with Kubuntu and the quality the video is more or less OK. The latest ATI drivers for my ATI 4870 also improved a lot the visualization of the video. Playing the MTS files on the WD TV works 100%, and the quality is superb.

So I can play the files in my computer, BUT for KDE 4.3  Dolphin, it  has no support for thumbnails for MTS (M2TS) files… so I need to open each file to see wich are it’s contents… a painfull task.

It took me a while to solve more or less this issue. It’s not perfect, but it helps:

Using the latest ffmpeg, donwloaded from the sources, I can create JPG thumbnails related to the each MTS file. The idea came from here: http://johannesluderschmidt.de/?p=525

I’ve changed the script so that I can create AVCHD thumbnails:

#!/bin/bash
for FILENAME in *.MTS
do
if test -f “$FILENAME”; then
echo “Create thumbnail of $FILENAME”
ffmpeg -i “$FILENAME” -ss 00:00:01.00 -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 180×120 “$FILENAME”.jpg
#cp $FILENAME ~/test1/
else
echo “File $FILENAME not existing.”
fi
done

Save this file with a name like avchdthumb.sh, somewhere on your path, and make it executable with chmod +x avchdthumb.sh

Now you can go to your folder (folders) whre you have stored your MTS files, and just run the command like this for example: /home/primalcortex/tools/avchdthumb.sh

It will take a while, depending of the number of files and the your computer horsepower… I have an I7, so can’t complain…

At the end the result will be for each MTS file a new MTS.jpg file with the initial frame as the thumbnail.

Now I have an idea what’s in the MTS videos.

If thumbnails in video format are needed, like the first 10s, then this URLhttp://code.google.com/p/hdffxvrt/ will do the job. Just change the line for the resolutionof the HF200 to 1920×1080, and execute the script with:  hdffxvrt thumb 0001.MTS. This will create a 10s clip in MOV format named 0001.MTS.mov.

This is a good as it gets. Now I’ll I need is Picasa in Linux to support AVCHD

Regarding the camera itself, when connecting through USB to the Kubuntu, there is no problems in detecting and accessing it through Dolphin, but it’s faster to use a SDHC card reader to copy the files. The camera can create thumbnails for the videos when connecting by USB, but in my case it failed to create ALL thumbnails… weird…

NTFS-3G, Vmware and 100% CPU

NTFS-3G can consume 100%CPU when a virtual machine is running on an NTFS partition and/or external disk (my case).

With this issue, using Vmware and using a VM machine can be a slow experience when doing high IO operations inside the VM machine. For example trying to uncompress a large zip file on the VM machine, just makes the host 100% CPU on the NTFS-3g process.

To solve this issue, just shutdown the VM machine and add the following line to the vmx file with your favorite text editor:

mainMem.useNamedFile = “FALSE”

Problem solved.

Linux and ATI drivers – Hangs on screensaver

I’ve an ATI graphics card. When going away for a while, Kubuntu could lock up with a black screen when the powersave mode of the graphics card/monitor kicked in.

This is a known, as far as I know issue with ATI drivers.

I could reboot the system cleanly throught the magic keys ALT- BUSIER mnemonic, but it was pretty annoying. The XOrg log show something like: [fglrx] ASIC hang happened.

Doing this, sudo aticonfig –auto-powerstates=off –effective=startup solved the issue so far..

[K]ubuntu USB errors->Slow boot

I’ve installed Kubuntu 8.10 64 bit on my new computer. This new computer has a Asus P6T motherboard.

What started to happen was that boot became quite slow due to some USB errors… For example:

usb 5-1: device descriptor read/all, error -71 and usb 5-1: device descriptor read/all, error -110

This slowed down booting for 30s to one minute as the console was outputing these errors… After a while, boot progressed, and the KDE logon screen appeared. No issue was found accessing any connecting USB device.

First I thought of my WD Elements 400GB external drive was the reason for the issue. But fully disconnecting it didn’t do the trick. I also thought it might be an issue with the motherboard, the new Asus P6T, but it looks like it was more a Linux kernel module issue.

At least this for me worked:

rmmod uhci_hcd

rmmod  ehci_hcd

rmmod usbcore

and then change the module loading order:

modprobe usbcore

modprobe ehci_hcd

modprobe uhci_hcd

Rebooted, and problem solved.

Kubuntu and Firefox looks: It looks bad

As I’m fully installing my new computer from scratch with Kubuntu 8.10 64bit, some things aren’t quite right.

One of the most annoying is that Firefox on Kunbuntu doesn’t look very good…

The radio buttons for example look belong to a different complete theme than Firefox. Not good.

The solution?

sudo apt-get install gtk2-engines-qtcurve gtk-chtheme

Then goto System Settings, select Apearance and then GTK Styles and Fonts. On GTK styles choose to use another style. On the dropdown box you should have now QT4, QTCurve and Raleigh.

Choose QTCurve.

Restart Firefox, and pronto/listo/voilá!

[K]Ubuntu: Grub and XP NTLDR missing

My scenario: I have three internal hardisks: 1TB WD (sda) and on 640GB (sdb) WD disks.  sdb is my boot disk, so I have an Windows XP 32bit, and Kubuntu 8.10 ( ) 64 bit. I also have an old 160GB ide disk (sdc). I’m running in AHCI mode.

After installing Kubuntu, Grub created entries for Kubuntu and Windows XP.

After reboot I can boot into Kubuntu but booting into Windows XP, it stoped with the dreaded NTLDR is missing…

Kubuntu install created this for booting windows:

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/sdb1
title           Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root            (hd1,0)
savedefault
map            (hd0) (hd1)
map            (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader     +1
Which doesn’t work. At boot it gives the above error: NTLDR is missing.

The solution? In my case all it took was to change to this:

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/sdb1
title           Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root            (hd1,0)
savedefault
chainloader     +1

Now it boots without any problem

Digikam and Kubuntu 8.10

Instructions for instaling the latest version of Digikam on Kubuntu 8.10 are located here http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Digikam+Compilation+on+Kubuntu+Intrepid

On Kubuntu 8.10 64bits, so far good. I had to lauch it twice so at the second time all the Kipi plugins where detected.