I thought I’d post a quick update just as a keepalive and let those of you who still actually pay attention to my little corner of WordPress that I’m still here, I’m still doing stuff with Linux and technology, and I haven’t completely given up on The Linux Critic blog just yet.

What I’m running now

In order of age, here are my primary machines and their roles these days, and how I have them set up.

Azalin

This computer is one I built myself from parts I ordered from all over the place way back in 2005. Ugh, but that seems like a long time ago. And that’s because it IS.

As you might expect, “Azalin”, as I have always had it named on my network, isn’t really that great as a desktop machine any more. It’s running an older, single-core AMD 64-bit CPU that really shows its limitations when trying to do things in 2012, let me tell you.

As a result, Azalin’s role has been reduced to that of a headless, basic-functionality server. I still have it running Linux Mint 9 Fluxbox Edition, and it’s rock-solid stable.

Azalin also serves as an IRC server for a small group of geeky friends I have, and I utilize it as my primary SSH box for if I need to remotely get into my home network for any reason.

I don’t dual-boot any of my Linux systems anymore (and haven’t for years), but I do still have the occasional need for Windows for very specific things, so Azalin acts as a virtual host as well. When I need it, I launch a virtualized Windows XP machine that resides on Azalin via Oracle VirtualBox, which still serves that purpose reasonably well. This doesn’t come up very often, but it’s pretty painless whenever I do utilize it, so that’s the solution I’ve continued to stick with.

Thuron

“Thuron” is a Darter Ultra laptop I bought from System 76 a little over two years ago now. It was decked out when I bought it, with 6 GB of RAM, a speedy (and unfortunately very power-hungry) Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and a 320 GB hard drive.

Currently Thuron is running 64-bit Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon desktop environment. For a two year old laptop, I’m still pretty happy to say that I get around two hours of battery life under load on the thing, which is nice, because the small and lightweight nature of this laptop begs for it to be carried around.

I’ve less and less need for the 320 GB hard drive in this laptop, as I’ve been using Google Music instead of locally-stored MP3s, and I’m only selectively syncing certain Dropbox folders, so I’m finding that the hard drive space is going largely unused here.

Because of that, I’ve been giving serious thought toward replacing the 320 GB SATA drive with a solid state drive of maybe 120 GB, since they have come down in price quite a lot, and I know I would benefit from the faster read/write and reduced power consumption they bring to the table.

In the mean time, this little laptop of mine still gets a lot of use, and I really enjoy using it. It’s one of the best buys I’ve made in terms of computers in a long, long time.

Malvius

I bought a new desktop computer to replace Azalin’s desktop functions last year, and named it “Malvius”. This one is from ZaReason, and it’s a lot beefier than Azalin could ever be, with 8 GB of RAM and a 6-core AMD CPU that blows the doors off of anything else I’ve ever owned.

Malvius is still running 64-bit Linux Mint 11, which is very stable and a pretty enjoyable OS experience for me. I intend to upgrade it to a newer Mint release at some point, but as I’m still kicking the tires on the Cinnamon desktop — and I’m finding that there are some shortcomings to making that leap — I’ll be sticking with Mint 11 on Malvius for a time going forward yet.

Other devices

In the past year or so I have spent a fair amount of time diving into Android too, which, as I was pleased to discover, was pretty familiar to me as a Linux guy once I dug into it a bit.

My phone

I have an HTC EVO 4G that’s (as of two days ago) running CyanogenMod 7 Stable running on it, which is so far a much smoother and FASTER Android experience than Sprint and HTC’s bastardized approach to Gingerbread has been.

I had been holding out for Ice Cream Sandwich, but upon further research, it doesn’t appear that that would be the best choice for a phone that only has 512 MB of system memory, so I went with CyanogenMod 7, which is based on Gingerbread, so I have plenty room for apps after the space the ROM itself takes up.

My tablet

Back in April I bought a Kindle Fire. I spent a couple of months using it as Amazon intended it, namely to play Amazon prime movie/TV content and consume other Amazon stuff.

However, the extremely limited usefulness of the Kindle Fire as a more general-purpose tablet was frustrating to me. This was mostly because of the extremely locked-down default interface and total lack of any of the versatile app ecosystem that any Android device should be able to take advantage of.

Amazon used Gingerbread as their starting point for the Kindle Fire’s OS, so I discovered with some hacking I was able to get Google apps sideloaded on it — Gmail, Google+, et al — but it was painful to do, and completely avoidable if Amazon would have just allowed the Google Marketplace rather than silo everything into the very restricted Amazon app store.

So, after taking the Kindle Fire as far as it could go with its nerfed out-of-the-box configuration, last month I flashed it and installed CyanogenMod 9 on it, which is based on Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0).

What an incredible improvement. I’m finding that I’m really enjoying this device now as a general-purpose tablet, and I get a ton of use out of it.

Admittedly, had the Google Nexus 7 tablet been out a few months ago, I would have bought one of those instead of a Kindle Fire, hands down. For the same price, the Google 7-incher has much better hardware, and it wouldn’t have required me to do any hacking to get a decent OS on it (since the Nexus 7 ships with Jellybean).

But for what it’s worth, I’m definitely not sorry I bought my Kindle Fire. With Android 4.0 on it, it’s a quality device, and I plan to use it for as long as it continues to work.

Keep watching, folks

So, that’s about it for my keepalive. I’m sorry I haven’t been better with posting here for so long, but I’m going to make a point to at least throw some thoughts together for a quick rant, review, or rumination from time to time again, so for those of you who are still around, keep an eye on this blog.

I haven’t gone anywhere, and I still love to talk about Linux and technology.

Thanks for reading!

– Trent

In a previous post, I discussed the various things I do to recent releases of Firefox to make it behave itself. In this post, I’ll be discussing the process I go through with the Chromium browser, namely with respect to extensions (since there really isn’t much one can configure in Chromium natively).

The extensions list

I install a lot of extensions in Chromium, currently 14 in total.

Here they are:

1. Adblock Plus for Google Chrome (Beta)
2. AutoScroll
3. Better Facebook
4. Google SSL Web Search
5. HTTPS Enforcer
6. Last Tab Standing
7. MAFIAAFire Redirector
8. New Tabs Always Last
9. Search Box
10. Sexy Undo Close Tab
11. Smooth Gestures
12. Speed Dial 2
13. Webmail Ad Blocker
14. YouTube Options for Google Chrome

Discussion

This may seem like a lot of extensions, but believe me, this still doesn’t even address some of what I still view as the bigger issues in Chromium (which I detailed in another previous post), such as tabs on top, the lack of a sane status bar and lack of menus, and overall inflexible nature of Chromium’s entire interface, not to mention the rather obnoxious URL autocompletion that there is no way to disable.

But, after repeated extension hunts, I have been able to find the above list, which addresses a fair number of other issues, annoyances, and gaps in basic functionality.

Here I will touch briefly on each one of them.

Adblock Plus for Google Chrome (Beta)

I’ve tried a number of other ad blockers in Chromium, and this one is by far the best and the least buggy.

In my opinion, all browsers in this day and age should have the basic functionality of being able to subscribe to block lists built into them natively, but that hasn’t happened yet. Until then, Adblock Plus exists as an extension, and nobody should be without it.

AutoScroll

AutoScroll addresses the bizarre decision to not include this basic piece of functionality in the browser natively. In my opinion, a browser without autoscroll is like a car without reverse.

Not a lot to say about this extension other than it does the job well, and fills this gap the developers decided for some puzzling reason to leave open.

Better Facebook

Soon to be known as “Social Fixer“, according to Better Facebook’s lone developer (due to Facebook being antagonistic about the “Better Facebook” name), this extension is an absolute must for anyone who uses Facebook even a little. With Facebook being a continually moving target of seemingly random, unplanned interface changes with sporadic content shuffling with all the apparent order and reason of a 2-year-old’s toybox, Better Facebook applies order to the site and actually makes it usable and pleasant by comparison to browsing the site unaided. Check it out if you haven’t already.

Google SSL Web Search

Since SSL is available more and more on the web, I figure I’ll use it. Google still labels this as “beta”, but I’ve had zero problems with it, and it seems to consistently return the same results as the regular Google search.

HTTPS Enforcer

This goes along with my decision to try to use HTTPS whenever it’s available. HTTPS Enforcer looks for HTTPS versions of any website you visit, and attempts to redirect you to them instead of the normal site. It constantly updates its list with new ones as they are found.

Last Tab Standing

Ever accidentally closed the last tab you have open, only to realize that it was the only one left, and your browser closed as a result? This takes care of that behavior. I do this all the time, and I find it annoying to have to re-launch my browser when I accidentally do this, so this extension is a nice, quiet little way to prevent that.

MAFIAAFire Redirector

This extension fixes the damage caused to DNS by certain governments and corporate interests.

New Tabs Always Last

Another one of those things that should be included natively in any tabbed browser is the ability to define default tab opening behavior. Chromium lacks this simple functionality, so we must rely on an extension to force it to put tabs where I prefer them when opening links in new tabs (at the end). I know some people prefer that new tabs open next to their current one, but that’s really kind of a 50-50 thing according to every poll I’ve seen on the subject. This extension is for the 50% of us that want it the way Chromium doesn’t do it.

Search Box

I’ve never liked searching from the address bar; it’s inefficient when compared to just clicking your focus on a search box and typing your search terms.

This extension makes a little magnifying glass icon on the right-hand side of the Chromium toolbar, and when you click on it the cursor focus is set to a text box that pops up, unobtrusively in the upper right. It’s nice because then you can type or paste your search term without opening a new tab first (or navigating away from the tab you’re currently on). The Search Box extension always opens search results in a new tab.

Sexy Undo Close Tab

You know, I started using Chromium about a year and a half ago, and it was only recently — after being TOLD in a comment on a different post about this — that I discovered that Chromium could natively re-open the last closed tab. I didn’t know it could do this.

So while I withdraw my complaint that it didn’t natively have this functionality, I still would rather just see a list of closed tabs (because sometimes I want to re-open one that is 14 or 15 closed tabs ago), so the Sexy Undo Close Tab (unsure what makes it “sexy”) does the trick, and does it very well. It lets you define just how many tabs it keeps in its list, and it so far has never even once lost track. Impressive, considering how often Chromium still crashes for me or hangs/stops responding.

Smooth Gestures

The Smooth Gestures extension is a good way to get mouse gestures functionality similar to what the Opera browser has done natively for years. I admittedly don’t use much more than forward, back, refresh, and new tab for gestures (you can define pretty much whatever you want), but I definitely notice when I don’t have this behavior available, so I like this one a lot.

Speed Dial 2

I have a lot of issues with Speed Dial 2, but this is the best one I’ve found so far. I greatly prefer the behavior and features of the Speed Dial extension for Firefox, but they don’t have a version of it for Chromium, so Speed Dial 2 for Chromium is what I get.

Still, it lets the user manually determine the positions of speed dial items, and it does let one define multiple groups, which is nice (and it works pretty well). My big complaints are how buggy/flaky Speed Dial 2 is, how it handles the width/size of the speed dial items themselves, and how slow it is to load on my older machines.

It’s very feature rich though, so I’m keeping an eye on this one and I have high hopes for it.

Webmail Ad Blocker

Removes ads from GMail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! mail accounts. It also lets the user block other elements, though I mostly got it for the ad-blocking capabilities. Works really well, at least so far.

YouTube Options for Google Chrome

You know, the primary reason I was using FlashBlock was because of YouTube. I hate how there’s no way to NOT auto-play videos there.

This extension makes the buggy and problematic FlashBlock totally unnecessary (for that) because it has an option that prevents YouTube videos from automatically playing.

One of the other nice features of this extension is its ability to resize videos to match the quality.

It’s always bugged me when watching a 720p or 1080p video on YouTube and my only options were “too small” and “full screen” (which is often too big, and/or blocking other stuff). This extension automatically resizes the displayed video to match its quality, so it makes 720p videos quite a bit bigger, and much more enjoyable to watch.

Conclusion

Like I mentioned above, this is a lot of extensions. Easily as many as I use in Firefox, and if more were available to address my other issues and observed shortcomings with Chromium, I’d be using even more of them.

Admittedly, many of these are not things I consider must-haves in terms of native browser functionality (Better Facebook, Webmail Ad Blocker, YouTube Options, and the SSL related ones for example), but I’ve found them very useful, and I’m probably going to find myself referring back here to my own list in the future when setting up a fresh installation of Chromium, when I inevitably scratch my head and think, “What was that other extension I usually install?”.

Hopefully some of you find something useful in this as well!

– Trent

However, try as I might, I simply encounter too many dealbreakers in Chromium.

When I think about it, the last version of Firefox that didn’t drive me crazy with crashing, incompatible add-ons, and stupid UI changes and features removed, it would have to be Firefox 3.6.

I keep forgetting how to do this, so I’m posting this here as much for my own reference as for anyone else’s. This is how to downgrade newer versions of Firefox to 3.6 and keep it that way, at least until things settle down a little, or until another browser comes along that can actually be a viable replacement for it — unlike newer versions of Firefox, sadly. This works with Mint 11, which means it will also work with Ubuntu 11.04.

Step 1: Edit /etc/apt/sources.list

This is a simple matter of editing a few files, ultimately. The first of which is sources.list. So, from a terminal, type this:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Paste the following into there:

deb http://ftp.iinet.net.au/pub/ubuntu/ maverick main
deb http://ftp.iinet.net.au/pub/ubuntu/ maverick-updates main

Then hit ctrl+o to save it and ctrl+x to exit the file.

Step 2: Pin firefox and firefox-branding packages

Still from the terminal, type:

sudo nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/firefox

Paste the following into the file:

Package: firefox
Pin: release n=natty
Pin-Priority: -10

Package: firefox
Pin: release n=maverick
Pin-Priority: 900

Then hit ctrl+o to save it and ctrl+x to exit the file.

Then type:

sudo nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/firefox-branding

And paste the following into there:

Package: firefox-branding
Pin: release n=natty
Pin-Priority: -10

Package: firefox-branding
Pin: release n=maverick
Pin-Priority: 900

Then hit ctrl+o to save it and ctrl+x to exit the file.

Step 3: Update apt-get and install Firefox 3.6

Type this into your terminal window:

sudo apt-get update

This will refresh your packages list in apt.

Now do this so that you blow away the existing mess that is the current version of Firefox:

sudo apt-get remove firefox

And, finally, install Firefox 3.6:

sudo apt-get install firefox

And you’re done!

In my experience, this still gets updates as Mozilla pushes them out to 3.6.* installations (through the source you added in step 1), so as long as they’re still supporting Firefox 3.6, this will still be a viable option.

And I discovered that since I don’t need as many add-ons in Firefox 3.6 (I kept having to find more and more for later versions to deal with stupid things they kept breaking after Firefox 4), it actually starts up and seems to load webpages faster than the supposedly “new and improved” releases. So this is really more of an upgrade than a “downgrade”, but I didn’t want to confuse anyone.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

– Trent

At the time, considering that there was no Linux client, an only barely-functional interface and muddy limitations on the framework they’d hastily set up, it was clear that this was premature. Appropriately, given the look of it, I had dismissed Google Music out of hand as a non-item.

However, in the intervening weeks, something happened. It got better.

Overview: What is this?

In the end of July, Google announced the release of their “Music Manager” client for Linux, which surprised me — I wasn’t honestly expecting them to pay any attention to the Linux users out there for a long time to come, if ever — so I thought I’d give Google Music a second look, and since it was now available for Linux, I thought I’d do a writeup here about it.

I downloaded the 32-bit .deb file from the Google Music site and installed it.

It’s a pretty basic application, as its only real purpose is to watch folders on your local computer for music and upload them to your Google Music account.

That’s pretty much it. You log in on it with the Google account associated with Google Music (the one to which the invite was sent) and it just quietly cranks away in background, uploading everything it identifies in the folders you tell it to watch.

Once your music is uploaded, you can listen to it from any Internet-connected computer via the music player webapp (simply by navigating in your favorite browser to http://music.google.com), or you can stream it directly to your phone via the free Android app.

This, quite simply, is all Google Music is about. The ability to enjoy your own music from wherever you happen to be, as long as you’re connected.

Cool things

I’ve been using Google Music — which is still in beta — for approximately three weeks now. Overall, I’m extremely impressed. I’m glad I came back to this to give it another try, because at this point it’s something that I can see myself continuing to use going forward.

It took me a few days to get my current electronic music library uploaded. I have a lot of CDs, but I don’t have them all ripped, so currently I’m using Google Music with 4,977 tracks. The upload process is tedious and time consuming, but once they’re up there, you’re good to go.

The 20,000 track limit

Which brings me to one of the coolest things about Google Music: the 20,000 track limit.

That’s right. Twenty thousand tracks. I was initially a bit confused by this when I started looking at Google Music, as I was unable to discern what the limitations were. I saw the “20,000 tracks” limit, but I couldn’t find the space limitation anywhere. Surely they were slapping a total storage limit no bigger than 7 or 8 GB, right?

Nope. It’s 20,000 tracks. Well, and no tracks can be larger than 250 MB. But that’s it. That’s the limit.

And did I mention that this is free, as in gratis?

My nearly 5,000 tracks with which I am testing Google Music take up roughly 30 GB on my hard drive. But this isn’t a problem, since I’m under the 20,000 track limit. So I was able to upload all of my digital tracks to Google Music and I have a 15,000+ track buffer before I’m even close to reaching the limit of Google Music’s storage for a free account.

Instant mixes

One of the other cool things is the “Instant Mixes”. In the music player webapp, you can pick a track, any track, and select “Make instant mix” from the menu dropdown at the corner… and it makes a playlist of 25 tracks from your music library of things it thinks go well together.

And I have to say, I’ve been playing around with this, and it does a good job. If I’m in the mood for listening to some blues, rather than just hit the “Blues” genre, I actually find I get a slightly better playlist by picking a song I’m in the mood for and making an Instant Mix from it.

It’s a nice feature, and I’m finding myself using it a lot.

Streaming sound quality

To give this a good test, I’ve been playing music via streaming from the Google Music webapp from my laptop over wifi.

I’m picky about my sound quality, and to be honest, I can’t tell the difference between my locally stored tracks and the ones I have been streaming from Google. They sound absolutely the same to me, and I’ve had no problems buffering or stopping or lagging at all. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that I’ve been playing music stored on my hard drive, and I wouldn’t be able to tell you otherwise if you gave me a blindfold test.

The Android app

I have an HTC Evo 4G phone running Android 2.3 (“Gingerbread”). Since I was testing out Google Music, I figured I’d try out the free Android app for it and see how it played on my phone.

It downloaded and installed easily, and, since my phone was already associated with the same Google account with which I was testing Google Music, it automagically found my entire music library.

As a mobile music player the interface is simple, elegant, and pretty intuitive. It’s aesthetically a lot nicer looking than the default Android music player app that came with my phone, and I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now to give it a good test drive. It even shows album cover art nicely for whatever track happens to be playing.

One nice thing I noticed immediately is that if you make a playlist in Google Music on your computer, it instantly appears in the Android app on your phone as well, so if you’re planning ahead, you can use your computer and build playlists ahead of time rather than use your phone’s touchscreen, which, let’s face it, can still be a bit cumbersome these days if you’re creating a large playlist.

And like playlists, anything you add to your Google Music library becomes instantly available on your phone as well, which is nice.

To me, having my entire digital music library instantly available from my phone, wherever I am (as long as I have signal) is a huge part of Google Music’s appeal.

Plus, like streaming over the web to my laptop, streaming over 3G to my phone is superb with respect to sound quality. I can’t tell the difference between tracks stored locally on my phone itself and tracks that it is streaming from my Google Music cloud library, and even in areas where my signal is sketchy, it has yet to stop and make me wait while it buffers, or break up, or demonstrate any issues whatsoever.

I should also point out that streaming music in this way doesn’t seem to impact the battery life on my phone any worse than playing locally stored (microSD card) music does, something which surprised me. I can stream music to my phone from Google Music for 6+ hours and still have enough battery life left on my phone to last me the rest of the day in normal use.

I’ve been very surprised by the sheer lack of problems with this, which, for a “beta”, is pretty polished and well-implemented.

Needs and gripes

I don’t have many criticisms of Google Music so far, which is saying something. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it hasn’t yet. As an overall, this has been an extremely positive experience, so I’m reduced to nitpicking to find things to include in this section.

More (any) uploading options

So I mentioned that I uploaded 4,977 tracks in my test of Google Music. All that was involved in this was pointing the Google Music Manager to the folder in which I keep my digital music, and then waiting while it uploaded stuff automatically.

Well, the issue I have is that that total track number should in fact be 4,980, not 4,977. Inexplicably, it skipped three tracks from one album (Concrete Blonde’s “Bloodletting”), and nothing I did could convince it to upload them to my Google Music Library.

It didn’t tell me what problem it had with the tracks — they weren’t any different from the other 4,977 tracks it uploaded successfully — and it didn’t offer me any way to manually upload them.

And that’s the problem. The Google Music Manager works great most of the time, but if it for whatever mysterious reason decides it doesn’t want to do something, there is NO way in heaven or on earth to convince it to do it anyway.

So the Music Manager needs a way to override this nonsense so I can upload the three tracks it skipped. The three tracks in particular play just fine on my phone (I manually copied them to the device’s microSD card), they play fine on my computer, they have played fine on any other device on which I have tried them, and they were ripped by the same program, at the same time I ripped the other 7 songs on that album. But Google Music Manager will NOT upload them, no matter what.

It’s pretty frustrating, and by doing a little casual searching around the web, it sounds like this is a common problem.

I know this is still in beta, but hopefully they fix this. It can be totally resolved by adding a simple manual uploader where you can browse local files and manually select them for upload. Done and over with.

Metrics on the Android app

While the actual Google Music webapp player has rudimentary metrics (number of plays on each track), it’d be cool if that would be incremented by plays on the Android app as well. I think it would also be interesting to have other metrics and statistics available so that I could, for example, make a playlist on the fly of “never listened to” tracks, or “favorite tracks” based on number of plays or likes, or even just a “random 100 tracks” function if I just want to listen to some music from my library but I’m not picky about what it is.

This could all be accomplished pretty easily I think, since they’re tracking this stuff anyway; they just need to include it in the user interface.

Tighter Android interface integration

Because I’ve been using the Android app on my phone mostly in my car, I’d like to see tighter integration between the Google Music Android app and the actual Android interface on my phone, especially with respect to lock screen controls.

For example, if I’m using the default Android music player app on my phone (playing locally stored tracks from my microSD card), if my phone’s screen is locked, the music player still displays the cover art from whatever is playing, and there is a pause button and skip controls, right there on the lock screen.

This is nice especially while driving, since if I want to pause playback or skip to the next song, I don’t have to unlock the phone and navigate any screens on my phone (which is dangerous while driving).

However, with the Google Music Android app, while the phone screen is locked, that’s it. You have no controls without unlocking the phone, and that’s cumbersome at best while walking around, and downright hazardous while driving.

Better playlist/queue options

This applies to both the webapp and the Android app. I’ve gotten used to he ability to play a mix of songs/artists/albums instantly without having to create a playlist (an “instant queue”, so to speak).

I don’t always want to create a named, saved playlist… sometimes I just want to pick three albums and play them all together, shuffled. Can’t do that the way this is set up, and I find it odd that such a simple piece of functionality is lacking in Google Music.

A stop button on the interface

This one I had to include. For some reason, over the past several years, there has been this trend to remove the stop button from music players, both web, application and portable.

I don’t always want to pause. Sometimes I just want to stop playback. This actually complicates the interface, because if I want to get the same behavior, I need to first pause a track, and then I have to manually back it up to the beginning before playing again.

Why add extra steps when just keeping the “stop” button around accomplishes this? I don’t understand that. It’s a small complaint, but it’s everywhere these days (except in a handful of good music players like Clementine). It’s one of those UI design trends I wish would just die a swift death so we can move on.

Conclusion

As I’ve already said, I’m pretty happy with Google Music so far. Even taking into account that this is still marked “beta” everywhere, this is a good enough, and polished enough experience that I’d openly admit that I would pay for a service like this.

While it has a few little shortcomings, they’re pretty minor in the grand scheme of things; the important stuff — the streaming quality, the storage allocated for users, the accessibility — this all works flawlessly so far in my experience, and because of that, the minor quibbles I have with the Android app, the interface, and the uploader don’t bother me nearly as much as they would if the overall experience was not so overwhelmingly positive.

I have often lamented the horrible state of MP3 players over the past few years, and ultimately, if this is how Google Music is going to do things, that lack of a decent replacement for my old MP3 player is going to matter less and less.

If anything, this is better… it means I’m carrying one less device, and the amount of local storage on that device (in this case, my Android phone) doesn’t matter much either, since Google Music can apparently stream music flawlessly over the air.

I think that unless data caps begin to severely curtail the usefulness of cloud applications for mobile devices, this kind of service can spell the death of separate portable music devices. Why carry around a 60 GB MP3 player if you can carry around your phone and just stream your entire music library at will?

It definitely presents some possibilities that just weren’t options up til now, and that makes me pretty optimistic about the future of Google Music. Give it a try, if you can get an invite. It’s worth checking out, and as I mentioned, it works great on Linux.

– Trent

UPDATE:

One of my more regular readers has pointed out to me that Google Music isn’t currently available outside of the United States, something about which I had been unaware.

Since this is still in heavy beta, I think that’s probably going to change down the road (since Google often limits the beta testing of their projects geographically), but with some of the rather ridiculous legal wrangling that seems to be going on, I have to wonder about the future of Google Music in general, much less internationally.

I guess only time will tell!

Additional screenshots

However, it’s still pretty annoying and still lacks a lot of functionality and flexibility. Since The Linux Critic is the best way I know to reach out to the community, I’m counting on you guys to give me some extension suggestions, because on my own so far I’m really not finding anything I need, no matter how hard I look.

Chromium is extensible, right? So here’s what I need…

There is supposedly a robust extensions ecosystem around Chrome/Chromium, but my searches have been pretty disappointing. One would think that with such a limited-feature-set browser that has a developer-friendly extension API, there’d be extensions to address all of my needs, but maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places?

Anyway, here is my list of things with which I’m hoping you fine people can help me. Any suggestions for add-ons that might meet these needs, please post in the comments section and I’ll be eternally grateful!

Tabs on top

By and large, the thing that drives me the most crazy about Chromium is the location of the tabs. Is there an extension/add-on out there that can allow the user to relocate the tabs to their proper position, i.e., below the address bar?

All the other stuff that bugs me about Chromium? It’s all doable. I can learn to deal. I’ve been putting up with browser annoyances for years. So I’ve learned to take a lot of them in stride. But this one? No. There simply HAS to be a way to fix this.

Tabs and mouse clicking behavior

This one’s resolved in Firefox by the ever-popular Tab Mix Plus add-on. In Chromium, oh how I miss it so.

I want to be able to configure Chromium so that if I double-click on the tab bar, it opens a new tab instead of the rather counter-intuitive behavior it does by default (it resizes the entire window).

I could probably also eliminate two other extensions I already have in Chromium (“Sexy Undo Close Tab” and “New Tabs Always Last”) if Tab Mix Plus (or something like it) existed for Chromium, because those are behaviors that need fixing too, and Tab Mix Plus does a great job of it in Firefox. I’m unconvinced that there isn’t some sort of Chromium equivalent of this add-on… I just must be missing it.

Disable address bar suggestions and autocomplete

Whenever I type a URL in Chromium’s address bar, it drops down and starts suggesting things. I don’t want it to do this, but there isn’t a way to disable this annoying, distracting behavior natively, and I haven’t found any extensions that have anything to do with it.

Address bar hides the most important part of the URL

This is such basic behavior that I refuse to believe that there isn’t an extension out there to fix this. Chromium chops off the “http://” in front of URLs in the address bar, no matter how you type them there. There’s nothing in the options to turn this annoying and potentially hazardous behavior off, so there must be an extension to address this, but I can’t find one.

Status bar?

Is there a Chromium equivalent for the popular Firefox add-on, Status-4-Evar?

Help!

That’s it. Those are the biggies. If I can find extensions to overcome those shortcomings, Chromium will be a much more tolerable browser for me. The tabs on top thing is almost a dealbreaker for me, so I’m seriously hoping there is a way to remedy that.

My own searches have yielded little. So here’s hoping that some of you out there reading this can point out something I missed in the extensions department.

Thanks in advance!

– Trent

Why would anybody actually WANT this?

I am, of course, talking about this.

Mozilla’s most recent nightly releases of Firefox (version 7) do not show the common URL protocol prefix http:// anymore and automatically hides trailing single slashes in a URL. Google canceled the prefix in a rather controversial move more than one year ago with the release of Chrome 5.

Because in a time when phishing is running rampant, and in a time when Firefox devs are already under constant criticism for just following the crowd with respect to browser design (up to and including feature assassination), this is a really great idea.

Sure. Let’s make it harder for users to see where they’re actually surfing. Let’s make it easier for phishers and scam sites out there by doing their job for them in concealing what is probably the most critically important part of the URL address system.

Following the crowd

And with Google’s Chrome browser chipping away at Firefox’s market share, is simply copying them move-for-move — including the stupid ones — really the best strategy to remain competitive in the never-ending browser wars?

I’ve talked about feature assassination here before, mostly because it really gets me worked up. There’s little I hate more than installing the latest-and-greatest version of an application I love, only to discover that the developers have been working diligently at removing things that I find useful about it.

It’s an ongoing trend that’s rampant these days, and nowhere do we see this more brutally exercised lately than in web browsers.

Firefox has always been a bit feature-lite in my opinion as a longtime Opera user. However, by installing a few add-ons, I used to be able to get Firefox’s limited functionality up to a level closer to what I’m used to in Opera, and I’d only be sacrificing performance (a bit) and startup time (admittedly more than I’d prefer) to do this.

But with each release, the Firefox team seems dedicated to increasing the number of add-ons I need to install.

And most of this just seems to be in their insistence on copying design flaws from other browsers.

They’re going out of their way to do this with Chrome squarely in their sights, even with things that make absolutely no sense. Tabs on top. Eliminating the status bar. And now intentionally hiding the most important part of the URL in the address bar.

Sure, in Firefox 4 we saw the addition of tab groups, and while it’s a new bit of functionality that nobody else is doing, and one that I like, it’s not exactly a killer feature. I doubt most Firefox users are even aware of it, much less are drawn to the browser because of it.

Benefit of the doubt?

With what I consider the most controversial instance of Mozilla developers just lazily copying other browsers’ development decisions, the tabs on top idiocy is at least redeemed by the fact that it’s easily fixed by going to the Tools menu and then the Toolbars submenu and simply unchecking “Tabs on top”. Thankfully.

But the elimination of the status bar in Firefox 4 necessitated the installation of an add-on to fix this, so I’m on the fence about whether or not they’ll do this with the option to disable this stupid URL-hiding behavior natively.

If not, I suppose that will be just one more add-on that I’ll need to install in order to make Firefox behave sanely.

And I’m wondering how many more before I reach my limit and just say “enough is enough”… how long before the Firefox browser is just a collection of add-ons and no useful native functionality to speak of?

So this is a writeup of the things I do to Firefox — in this particular case Firefox 4 — immediately after I install it. It used to be a much shorter list, but these days it’s getting more and more involved, so this writeup is as much for my own purposes, as a checklist of sorts, as it is to share my thoughts with others on how to tweak Firefox 4.

First things first: Add-ons

Most browsers, like most other applications these days, are engaged in a race with each other to remove as much functionality and to mix up and obfuscate as many features in the UI as possible. Firefox is no exception.

The trend these days is to remove things and replace them with stuff that’s less useful, or with nothing at all.

Fortunately, unlike some browsers, Firefox still has a thriving add-ons pool out there, and while I hate that with each new major version of Firefox I’m having to install more and more add-ons to make up for feature assassination, at least I still have the option to do so. For now.

So these days I’m installing a bunch of them. To be fair, only some of these add-ons are addressing what I consider to be “shortcomings” in Firefox; some of them are just to give me some extra functionality I wouldn’t normally expect a browser to do natively, or to deal with some site-specific behavior I find annoying or unsecure.

Here are my installed Firefox add-ons, in alphabetical order:

1. Adblock Plus
2. Better Facebook
3. Facebook Blocker
4. FireGestures
5. Flashblock
6. FlashVideoReplacer
7. HTTPS Everywhere
8. keyconfig
9. MafiaaFire Redirector
10. OptimizeGoogle
11. Speed Dial
12. Status-4-Evar
13. Tab Mix Plus

AdBlock Plus

Want to speed up your web browsing? The easiest way to do that is to get rid of the stuff your browser is trying to load that’s slowing it down. These days most of the time that’s ads. AdBlock Plus is a great add-on that references 3rd party lists that are always being updated, so it doesn’t take any real maintenance on the user’s part to keep your browsing experience relatively ad-free.

As a bonus, AdBlock Plus adds the ability for users to block content piecemeal, which, since Firefox doesn’t have that ability natively, gives the user a bit more control than he/she would otherwise have.

Better Facebook

When I first tried out the Better Facebook add-on last year I discovered that while I liked the myriad options it offered, it slowed down my browsing so much that I considered it unusable.

Since then, however, the developer of this full-featured add-on has tightened up performance on it by a huge amount, and now I consider this add-on to be a must have for any Facebook user. It takes a lot of the stupid, pointless interface roulette changes the Facebook developers like to introduce at random (often apparently without testing for major bugs first) and makes them optional to the end users, in addition to addressing a number of pretty serious privacy problems.

It gives the user a lot more control over what is shared, and with privacy as sketchy as it is on Facebook, I think we can all agree that more control for the users is a good thing. Give it a try if you haven’t already, it’s one you should not miss if you use Facebook even a little bit.

Facebook Blocker

Like the Better Facebook add-on I just discussed, the Facebook Blocker add-on addresses a shortcoming of Facebook and the web at large these days, not so much a problem with Firefox. This little gem blocks the Facebook objects so many sites are embedding these days that automagically load outside of Facebook itself.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think CNN.com needs to see my “Likes” or my friends list, so I’d prefer if those scripts simply didn’t exist on other sites. The Facebook Blocker makes that happen.

FireGestures

After being an Opera browser user for years, I grew accustomed to mouse gestures as a part of my normal usage of the application, and when I switched to Firefox I really missed that functionality.

FireGestures is a slick, basic little add-on that brings that to Firefox, with the straightforward ones already defined, and it gives the user the ability to define new gestures and customize the ones it comes with as well.

Flashblock

Like Adblock Plus, the Flashblock add-on automatically blocks objects that I have found can be obnoxious and performance draining, but in this case just anything made out of Adobe Flash.

Instead of auto-playing all Flash content on any website, Flashblock simply replaces each object with a simple play button, so the user can selectively play just the Flash content he or she wants.

I recently reformatted and rebuilt my laptop and when I set up Firefox on it, I left off Flashblock… and boy did I miss it. Immediately. A web without Flashblock is a pretty annoying one. Install this one for sure. You won’t be sorry.

FlashVideoReplacer

Kids, this one is a long time coming. Flash performance under Linux is dismal, and Adobe’s basic attitude is pretty much “Hey, you should count yourselves lucky we even OFFER Linux Flash plugin… so what, you want it to WORK WELL too? Whatever!”

This add-on is a great way to just take Adobe out of the picture, particularly if you watch a lot of movies on Youtube. FlashVideoReplacer lets you render the embedded video in the local codec of choice, like MP4. And suddenly the sluggish, choppy Flash video performance goes away, and is replaced by clear, smooth playback. It’s just that easy.

I’ve been using it for about a week now and it’s really slick. I haven’t had any problems whatsoever, and as a bonus, it works flawlessly with the Flashblock add-on as well. Enjoy this one!

HTTPS Everywhere

More and more parts of the web are available via HTTPS instead of the less-secure HTTP. To automagically redirect my surfing to the more secure versions of these sites, I have the HTTPS Everywhere add-on installed in Firefox. It provides a list of sites and checkboxes one can uncheck if for whatever reason it is causing any problems or if one wishes to view the HTTP version of the site.

keyconfig

This is one of those things that, face it, simply should just be part of Firefox. I really only use this for one thing. To disable one of the default keybindings in Firefox that was causing me problems. And search as I might, I could find no way to do this in Firefox natively, which I find extremely frustrating and confusing.

In Firefox 4 they introduced tab groups. While not necessarily a “killer” new feature, I have discovered that it can be useful, and I like the keyboard shortcut to get to the tab group screen: ctrl+shift+e.

Unfortunately, it’s somewhat easy to accidentally hit ctrl+shift+w by mistake, which closes the browser.

Nice. Not two shortcuts you want next to each other. Plus, alt+f4 already closes the window… is there really a compelling reason we need ANOTHER window closing keyboard shortcut for Firefox?

I don’t think so. So I install the keyconfig add-on so that I can do one thing and one thing only with it: disable ctrl+shift+w. That’s it.

Keyconfig does other stuff too. So those of you out there who wish you could easily change/add/create keyboard shortcuts in Firefox will find this useful.

MafiaaFire Redirector

This add-on undoes the damage governments have done to the web by seizing domain names, and it automatically redirects the specific sites to their backup domains. Fight censorship, support free speech, and stick it to the man. Mozilla is. Last month they famously refused a demand by the US Department of Homeland Security to remove access to this add-on, mainly because the demand wasn’t legal, and neither are the domain seizures. Fight the power!

OptimizeGoogle

Google’s well known “don’t be evil” mantra has entered popular culture in technology circles. But that doesn’t mean you have to trust that they’ll behave themselves. The OptimizeGoogle add-on lets users fix some of the more privacy-invasive activities Google engages in for those who use their services, and it allows the user to disable some of the more annoying behavior as well, such as Youtube ads and ads in Gmail.

Speed Dial

I first grew accustomed to the whole speed dial idea in Opera 9.something. Shortly after Opera introduced this feature in their browser, it started showing up in other browsers, though not as elegantly implemented in my opinion.

Firefox of course has no native speed dial functionality, but the Speed Dial add-on does this well, and has lots of useful features that none of the other browsers even do — like speed dial groups, which I really like.

I’ve grown so accustomed to using the Speed Dial add-on, I no longer use bookmarks for much at all. Instead, I have all the sites I regularly visit set up in one of two Speed Dial groups, and I periodically export my Speed Dial settings to a file I keep in Dropbox for safe keeping.

Just as a brief explanation for why I do it this way instead of using bookmark syncing, I do know some people use bookmark syncing and I know there are other add-ons that can do this, but most of the time, I actually want different shortcuts to sites depending on which computer I’m on… so syncing them is actually a feature I don’t really need.

Status-4-Evar

Here’s another one whose functionality used to be in Firefox, but it was removed. To get your status bar back, complete with progress bar and downloads indicator, this simple add-on works perfectly. I think it’s just plain stupid that I now need to install an add-on for this, but that seems to be the direction everyone’s headed these days.

I figure by Firefox 10 the whole browser will be a natively-functionless add-on framework, and to get basic functions most of us enjoy natively in Firefox today, we’ll be installing 20-30 add-ons to handle the simple things.

What? You want an address bar? Install the “Address-Bar-4-Evar” add-on! You want a “Home” button? Install the “Home-Button” add-on! What? You want Firefox 10 to render HTML and Javascript? Install the “HTML And Javascript Rendering” add-on! It’s a race! The first browser to reach zero native functionality WINS! You get the picture.

So I think we need to get used to add-ons like Status-4-Evar. We’ll be seeing a lot more add-ons like it in the near future.

Tab Mix Plus

This one is necessary in order to control a lot of bad default tab behavior that Firefox simply doesn’t provide settings for users to change. Tab Mix Plus is often the first add-on I install when I set up a fresh installation of Firefox. I find the browser intolerable without it.

Next step: preferences

After I get all my add-ons installed, I go to Edit and select Preferences and start changing stuff. I don’t change everything, but I do tweak a handful of things I consider important.

On the General tab

Right away here I change my homepage to my iGoogle homepage. It’s where I keep most of my main news RSS feeds plus a few other useful gadgets, and I like to see this right away when I fire up my browser.

The very next thing I do on the General preferences tab is select the Always ask me where to save files radio button.

This leads me to a minor rant. I do tech support frequently. Do you have ANY idea how many times I’ve spoken to a non-technical user over the phone and walked them through downloading something, only to have them express that they have no idea where Firefox put the file they downloaded?

THIS SETTING IS THE REASON FOR THAT. Mozilla devs, if you’re listening at all, PLEASE change this default to “always ask”. It’s far more intuitive that way, and you’ll save a lot of people a lot of hassle over what is really a very stupid default behavior. Thanks.

The Tabs… uh, tab

I don’t change anything under this; instead I manage all of the tabbed browsing behavior via the Tab Mix Plus add-on options. However, in Tab Mix Plus, I don’t actually change that much. I “Enable single window mode”, which in my opinion should be the default in any tabbed browser.

I also use Tab Mix Plus’ options to force the search bar to open results in new tabs, and I add the “Closed Tabs” button to my toolbar so it’s easily accessible. I typically also set my middle-click to close any tabs I middle-click on and middle-click on the tab bar opens a new one, just for convenience. Tab Mix Plus can do a whole lot more than this, but for now that’s pretty much all I’m doing with it.

The Content tab

I don’t tweak anything in the Content tab in Firefox.

The Applications tab

Here I change a lot of things that automatically play content in browsers to “Always ask”. I’d rather play wav files and video files locally, because in my experience it causes fewer problems with browser crashes, et cetera that way.

The Privacy tab

Here I change a bunch of stuff. I select the “Use custom settings for history” option from the top dropdown menu, and then I check “Remember my browsing history”, but I uncheck “remember my download history” and “remember my search and form history”.

I like having my browser remember my history session by session, but have no use for my download or form history, and I have “clear history when Firefox closes” checked anyway. Under that, I have it hang onto cookies and active logins, but I have it clearing everything else, including saved passwords (even though I tell it not to remember passwords anyway).

Also on the “Privacy” tab, I make use of one option I wish was in Chrome: “When using the location bar, suggest: NOTHING”.

I know I’m probably unusual in this, but I don’t want my browser to suggest sites for me from the address bar. I already know where I’m going when I’m typing something in there, and I find the suggestions dropdown to be annoying and extremely distracting, so I turn all suggestions off.

That’s one of the biggest dealbreakers for me in Chrome/Chromium. Fortunately they haven’t removed that option in Firefox yet. Of course, now that I pointed it out, I’m sure that one’ll be the next to go, right?

The Security tab

Under “Security” I uncheck “Remember passwords for sites”. I’ve never felt comfortable with my browser remembering passwords, and my paranoia is justified since there have been a number of security issues with browsers — Firefox included — storing saved passwords in questionable ways. So I don’t use this, and I probably never will, but I don’t really have much need for my browser to remember passwords for me. Your mileage may vary, of course.

The Sync tab

I don’t use Firefox Sync, so I don’t do anything on this tab in the Preferences window.

The Advanced tab

Here I turn on autoscrolling, which is particularly nice if you’re reading a really long article, or if you’re trying to play along on a guitar to a song whose sheet music you’re displaying from a webpage or something.

And that’s pretty much all I do on this particular Preferences tab.

Last but not least, the toolbar

The Firefox team hit some sort of hidden “shuffle up the interface” button on their end, because the toolbar and UI is all mixed up in Firefox 4.

To fix this, the very first thing I do is go to View and Toolbars and UNCHECK “tabs on top”, so that the tabs are back in their correct location. Why anybody would want the tabs in the wrong place is beyond me, but, like Opera, at least the Firefox team was courteous enough to we ignorant end users to leave us with the option to fix that arrangement.

Next, I right-click on the toolbar, select “customize”, and then drag the “Home” button — which is for some reason randomly all the way over to the right now — back to where it belongs, just to the left of the address bar.

Then I do the same thing with the “Reload” and “Stop” buttons, which are, in Firefox 4, randomly relocated between the address bar and the search bar.

Finally, to conserve space, I check the “use small icons” checkbox.

After all this, I have what is pretty much the Firefox 3.6.* UI, which in my opinion is what they should have stuck with.

There. Is that so hard?

And yes, I know. That little screenshot is showing GNU IceCat, but that’s what I’m using these days, and for all intents and purposes it has the same exact issues as vanilla Firefox 4 with respect to add-ons needed, preferences changed and interface tweaks done.

Conclusion

I remember when it used to take me only a couple of minutes to get a fresh Firefox install behaving sanely.

While I’ll freely admit that some of the add-ons I use aren’t things I expect to see natively in every browser, a lot of them still are, and that number just keeps going up with each release, it seems like.

My other complaint with Firefox 4 seems to be just the completely random approach to making the interface harder for users to use.

Tabs on top is a stupid default arrangement, and while I’ll grant that some users prefer it that way, most do not. It means mousing farther to get to the tab bar, and because of that it’s simply not as friendly.

Still, it’s a preference, and I can change it, so I can really only complain so far.

But why they chose to randomize the locations of standard toolbar buttons in this release positively baffles me. It’s like they went out of their way to move stuff, just for the sake of moving it. If you don’t have an actual practical reason for changing something like that, just leave it be, guys. Moving things just for the sake of moving them is just annoying and frustrating to your users, and it just adds that many more steps for us to put things back where they belong.

Unfortunately, that’s the world in which we live, and, sadly, Firefox is still the browser that annoys me the least, even with all the additional add-ons, preferences, tweaks, and UI fixing steps it now takes to make it behave sanely.

It’s now getting to the point where I actually need a set list like this one just so I can get through it quicker and without missing as many little steps and tweaks.

I find that to be somewhat sad, but, like I keep saying, at least in Firefox we have the option to fix the out-of-the-box wrong behavior, and hopefully we get to keep it that way.

– Trent

And it didn’t disappoint!

Peppermint Two overview

In this review, I’m going to go over the basic stuff first, and cover the things Peppermint Two comes with and how it is out of the box, and then I’ll go into what I think of things with respect to stuff I didn’t like, stuff I did, my overall opinion of the OS, and finally I’ll have a bunch of screenshots at the end, so they’re all in one place (well, with one exception, which is just below). I took a lot of screenshots this time, and you’ll find shots of a lot of what I’m talking about in this review, so be sure to browse through them and have a look. Peppermint Two is nice to look at, so give them a glance or two!

Now, down to business.

Like Peppermint One, Peppermint Two is a “hybrid” OS… that is, it’s cloud-oriented, lightweight, and slim with respect to overhead, resources, and pre-installed apps, but it’s built on a solid Lubuntu core that allows the user to install whatever they need via the repositories and still be a full-featured OS if that’s what one needs.

Where to get it

It’s available as a free download on the Peppermint OS website, or, if desired, you can buy a CD for a pretty reasonable price.

Live CD and installation

I downloaded the 32-bit ISO that the Peppermint team was kind enough to share with me last week, and burned it to CD normally. The ISO was smallish, being only 442 MB, so it fit easily on a CD after a swift download.

This is where I encountered my first issue: the Live CD didn’t work on my test laptop. The boot screen would come up, giving me a number of options, including “Install Peppermint OS” and “Try Peppermint OS live” and “check disc”.

But when I selected the “Try Peppermint OS live” option so I could test it out without installing, it cranked away for a good 5 minutes or so, and eventually dumped me to a command line interface and not a lot to do from there.

I tried running “startx” to see if I could get X running manually, but that didn’t work.

After a couple more tries, I determined that the Live CD portion was just not going to work on this laptop. I found this to be odd, because I’ve never had any other Live CD — including Peppermint One — not work on this laptop before.

I tried the Live CD option out on my newer laptop, and got the exact same results. Again, I’ve never had any Linux Live CD of any sort not work on this laptop either, so I thought maybe there was something wrong with my burn.

I ran the “check disc” option from the Peppermint Two CD and it didn’t seem to find any problems, and in checking around the web I’ve seen a few other reports of almost the exact same problem, so I think there must just be an issue with how the “Try Peppermint OS live” portion works or loads.

At any rate, I have been planning on wiping my old test laptop for some time anyway, so I figured I’d bite the bullet and try installing anyway. In my experience, I have on occasion found stuff that didn’t work right on the Live CD but worked fine on installation, and vise versa, so I figured worst case scenario, I would end up with a non-working system and I’d just install Peppermint One on it again.

When I tried the installation option, the installer loaded fine, presenting me with what appeared to be a pretty standard Ubuntu-esque installer. I selected my language, keyboard layout, partitioning options (I blew everything away and let it do a default, clean install) and then let it do its thing while I watched.

The installer had a nice, interactive slideshow with good info about featured applications, where to find help in the community, and what the Peppermint Two OS is really about.

The installation finished in about 15 minutes and kicked out the CD and performed a reboot.

Booting up and looking at the basics

The first bootup was just as fast as Peppermint One booted on this same laptop, and as I had suspected, the installation (unlike the Live CD) actually worked just fine.

Just to see if Peppermint Two was comparable to its predecessor, I immediately shut it down and did a cold boot to time how long it takes to come up, and I wasn’t disappointed. Peppermint Two on this old laptop takes 33 seconds from the point that I press the power button to the point where I can log in. Snappy!

Shutdowns still take about four seconds on this laptop, which is something else I really like. Nobody likes waiting around for a machine to shut down after they’ve finished doing their thing. Four seconds is a great time for this process, no complaints there.

And as a bonus, from login, the time to a usable desktop is practically instant. It’s responsive right away.

And there’s this. Like Peppermint One, this version is remarkably light on resources out of the box. Check out this screenshot. I installed htop because I like it better than top.

After a cold boot, htop shows only 90 MB of system memory in use after logging in with no other applications running!!!

Only 90 MB!!!

Wireless worked out of the box with no problems at all finding and connecting to my home wireless router.

Installed applications and defaults

Peppermint Two, like Peppermint One, uses LXDE as its desktop environment. Fast, simple, and easy to use, LXDE is one to watch these days, as it makes pretty intuitive sense to even non-technical or non-Linux users — my wife has been using this laptop regularly with Peppermint One on it for the past year and she’s had no problems whatsoever with the LXDE environment. Plus, with its resource-friendliness, LXDE was a good choice for Peppermint’s default desktop.

As such, PCManFM 0.9.9 is the default file manager, which, like LXDE itself, is fast, lightweight, and simple. It doesn’t have a lot of configuration options, but if all you’re looking for is the basics, PCManFM delivers better than most in my opinion.

Unlike Peppermint One, which shipped with Mozilla Firefox as the default browser, and Mozilla Prism for the “site specific browser” webapps that worked so well, Peppermint Two is based completely around the Chromium browser, and a custom Chromium-based app called “Ice” that is basically the Chromium equivalent of Mozilla Prism.

With respect to installed applications, again like its predecessor, Peppermint Two is pretty light, relying largely on these Ice-based site specific browser “webapps” for a lot of things.

So instead of an office suite of any kind, there’s a Google Docs webapp. Instead of an installed local mail client, there’s a Gmail webapp, and instead of a locally installed Twitter client, there’s a Seesmic webapp.

In addition to these, there is also an Ice-based webapp that goes straight to the Peppermint OS forums, which is nice (especially for someone looking for help with something, or just interested in being a part of that great community of other Peppermint OS users), and there’s a webapp for Pixlr (which I used to crop and resize and thumbnail all of the screenshots I made for this review) and webapps for Last.fm, Youtube, and The Cloud Player.

All of these work surprisingly well in my playing around with them. A lot of this stuff is Flash-based, and I had no issues whatsoever with any of the Flash content in these Ice-based webapps.

There are other, locally installed applications, however — this is still a “hybrid” approach, combining the cloud and local apps, remember?

So, we have Gedit for text editing, which is pretty familiar to any GNOME users out there. XChat is also installed by default, which auto-connects to the Peppermint IRC server when launched. I thought this was a nice hand extended for support and community for users new to Peppermint OS.

Speaking of the cloud, Dropbox is installed, so if you have an account, you’re only a few clicks away from configuring it to pull and sync your data. If you don’t have a Dropbox account, you should make one. It’s free, you get a couple of gigs of storage space for free to begin with, and they give you bonus space if you refer others. I’ve been using it for over a year now and I find it tremendously useful and easy to manage.

I discovered that Guayadeque is installed as a music player, and I found it surprisingly full-featured for a lightweight OS such as Peppermint.

GNOME-mplayer is also installed by default, for playing local video content.

There is no instant messaging client installed out of the box in Peppermint Two, but there is an Ice webapp called eBuddy Web Messenger, which I found kind of novel, because I’d never heard of it before this test run of Peppermint Two. I don’t do IMing, but it appears from eBuddy you can sign into a variety of instant messaging services if you have an account, which I think is pretty cool (as compared to running a local IM client like Pidgin or something). I didn’t play around with it much, but I thought it was a nice option.

Next page: what I think of all of this

Well, I still haven’t found one. However, thanks to Rockbox and a used device I bought from a friend, I have a stopgap that will hopefully last me until the portable music player electronics market sorts itself out.

Recap

Since 2005 — yes, that long ago — I’ve been getting an enormous amount of use out of an Archos XS202s 20GB MP3 player. It’s been a great little gadget… I can’t even calculate how many thousands of hours of use I’ve gotten out of it.

But its days are coming to an end. The lack of storage space is an endless source of frustration for me, as I am constantly having to decide what to remove from it in order for me to add any new music to it, and the battery life — once 12-15 hours — is now so bad that I can’t even mow the lawn while listening to it without it going dead on me.

And yet, despite the fact that this is now a 6 year old device, I still cannot find anything at all that meets my requirements, which don’t seem that unreasonable to me.

Namely,

1. Platform agnostic
2. 40GB or better native storage
3. Battery life of 10 hours or more

Numero uno rules out most players on the market, sadly. I’m of the firm opinion that MTP players need to die a painful death. Adding a “you must use $software to sync this device and that’s the only way to get music on it” layer to what is otherwise perfectly good hardware should be a criminal offense.

The correct way to put music on a device is with a program all of us already have: the file manager.

If I have to use anything other than copy+paste to get music on an MP3 player, it’s a big, egregious, insulting, frustrating FAIL.

My second requirement rules out solid state/flash memory based devices, though I’m hopeful in the next year or two we’ll start seeing such devices that are bigger than 32GB. But for now the market is flooded with little 4GB, 8GB and 16GB devices that are in my opinion a big step backward from the 20GB Archos player I’ve had since 2005 that is currently dying a lingering death.

And the third requirement shouldn’t be an issue, but there are a lot of players out there that have big, power-hungry screens that suck battery life down to pretty stupid levels. I want to be able to get a lot of use on a charge, and if it was possible to get 12-15 hours of life on a hard drive based device I bought six years ago, one would think that in 2011 it should be easily possible to do that with improvements in technology. One would think, at least.

So, faced now with the inevitable and inescapable demise of my Archos Gmini XS202s, and NOT A SINGLE PRODUCT that meets my stupid requirements, I’ve been in a quandary, still, even after all this time and exhaustive research.

What do I do in the meantime?

I bought a used device

By a chance conversation and my mentioning my quandary to a friend of mine a temporary solution was presented to me. He had a Toshiba Gigabeat S60 that he was willing to sell me for $30.00 plus whatever it cost to ship it to me.

And that was near perfect for my needs, for now anyway.

Wait, what?

I know what you’re going to say. “But the Gigabeat is an MTP device! It won’t work with Linux!”.

And this is true. And I can say that I would never, ever buy one of these new. Ever. However, for $30.00 plus the $5.00 shipping, it was a pretty reasonable risk to me.

It met my space requirements, had decent battery life (considering that it’s almost as old as the device it’s replacing), and it’s pretty easy to replace the battery on one of these, and I could work around the MTP/syncing issue.

Problems and solutions

Zach was kind enough to get me the Gigabeat in pretty short order, and I decided that I was going to give it a try as-is first, just to see how it worked, and see if it was even possible to work the thing with Linux.

The Gigabeat’s native OS of pain

This was an unmitigated disaster. I don’t honestly understand how anybody could use the Toshiba Gigabeat the way it comes from the manufacturer.

I tried everything I could come up with just to get music ON the device. From my Linux Mint laptop, I copied several gigs of music to it. But the device refused to see any of it.

So then I tried Banshee, which didn’t even see the device, and then I tried Rhythmbox, which saw the device, but just sat forever on an “updating the device” screen rather than let me load anything to it.

Clementine did the same thing Rhythmbox did.

Then, just to see if perhaps there was something wrong with the device itself, I fired up my Windows XP laptop that I have from work and tried synchronizing it from there.

That worked… kind of.

See, the Toshiba Gigabeat doesn’t just take the files copied to it and store them. It converts each one, individually, to some sort of goofy proprietary format, and THAT is the file it reads.

And it does this very, very, very slowly.

Synchronization with Windows Media Player went like this.

WMP: Okay, here’s the next song…. *copies*

Gigabeat: Receiving the song… wait for it…. wait for it…

Gigabeat: Okay, now I’m very slowly converting the MP3 which normal players can just read into something unnecessarily complicated and time-consuming….

Gigabeat: Wait for it… wait for it… wait for– DONE!

WMP: Okay, here’s the next song…. *copies*

Repeat approximately 5100 times. This process, from beginning to end, took over ten HOURS.

That’s not an exaggeration. Ten hours later, I had approximately 30GB of music on the 60GB device. And that was with Windows XP, the operating system with which this device was designed to operate.

After the mind-numbingly frustrating process of loading this, I can understand why the Toshiba Gigabeat was never really that popular a player. I’m pretty technical and I like a challenge, and if I was this frustrated by it — using Windows, no less! — how does the average user handle this pile of junk? I shudder to think of it.

Anyway, after all that, at least now I could listen to music on it, right?

Wrong.

The Gigabeat was broken with respect to reading ID3 tags. It saw the “artist” tag, and the “song title” tag just fine, as well as “genre” and “track” and a few others. However, it didn’t see any of the “album” tags, so it just organized all 5100+ songs into one “unknown album”. Irritating, but I could still use it. Right?

Wrong.

There’s no way to really effectively power the device down (except with a tiny little switch that physically cuts off the power from the battery, and that’s only operable with a paper clip or a pin or something, because it’s so small), so the actual on-off button that you can use your fingers on just puts the device into a kind of suspend mode.

From which it wakes up at random and stays on, draining the battery. Like while it’s in my bag. Or in my car’s glove compartment. So I’d be listening to it, on a full battery charge, and I’d suspend it, walk away, and a couple hours later go back to listen to it again and find the battery at 0% because it had been sitting there on the whole time, screen all backlit, burning the battery.

Needless to say, this was really an unusable device. Not only was it impossible to load it in Linux, but it was nearly impossible (and if nothing else, highly impractical) to load it in Windows (and I didn’t bother trying it in Mac OS X).

And the interface on it is difficult to use, buggy, flaky about how it plays music and reads metadata, and the Windows Mobile OS (yes, that’s what it runs natively) managed power horribly.

Rockbox time

So satisfied that I gave it a thorough run-through, I decided to try Rockbox on it.

Rockbox is basically replacement firmware developed from the ground up (no, it’s not Linux based, though it’s designed to be Linux friendly) to work on a number of popular portable music players (like the one I bought). The theory is, a lot of these devices actually have pretty good hardware — it’s just the defective-by-design, crappy firmware/operating systems that ruin the experience for everyone.

Now, according to the Rockbox site, the Rockbox firmware on the Gigabeat S60 is in the “unstable” or “experimental” category, so their default quick installer doesn’t work for it, and there are supposed to be problems with it.

But I figured I wouldn’t be any worse off. After all, the native OS was pretty much useless on the thing… how bad could Rockbox be?

I did try out the Automatic Installer and as prophesied, it didn’t work, wouldn’t even see the device.

So I moved on to the next phase, which was the rather lengthy Manual Installation Instructions.

This wasn’t actually as bad as it probably looks. I ran the little bootloader installer, which put the device in a state where I could get the Rockbox firmware directory on it, and then I did some tweaking after rebooting the device… and it worked.

And what a difference that made.

I was able to get 30GB of music onto it (via Nautilus, copy+paste) in only about a half hour. It saw all my metadata, including my “album” ID3 tags.

The interface was a little odd, but way more intuitive and easy to use than the default one.

Battery life was greatly improved on the Gigabeat with Rockbox. The power button actually powers the device down — which means that starting it up takes a little longer, but only a few seconds.

Not to mention, Rockbox has far more features and far more flexibility than the native OS on the Gigabeat had. The equalizer is better, and as a result, sound quality on playback is FAR better.

In short, Rockbox took a device that was really only fit for the trash can and made it totally usable.

Conclusion

I have a replacement battery ordered for my Toshiba Gigabeat S60, as even with Rockbox on it, I can really only get 4-5 hours of play on this thing. The screen really drains things fast, and I think a new battery will breathe some life into it.

But I think this will be a good stopgap for me until someone — ANYONE — out there stops screwing around and makes a decent MP3 player again. Technology has really taken a step backwards.

Six years ago, when I bought my Archos Gmini XS202s, I was expecting to get three, maybe four years of use out of it at most. And at that point I’d go from a 20GB player to something in the 60GB+ range.

But Archos doesn’t make any useful players anymore… their products are all solid state/flash memory based that are all smaller capacity — not bigger. And their hard drive based devices are all big, bulky video playing devices in which I have no interest.

Cowon is probably the closest to acceptable to me, as they are user friendly with respect to loading music, and seem to make decent electronics. But they too are behind when it comes to capacity (since bigger capacity players were widely available years ago), and I’m not overly fond of touchscreen devices, and that’s what they seem focused on.

So hopefully this self-refurbished Toshiba Gigabeat S60 will last me until someone starts making a decent MP3 player again, and then I’ll buy a new one.

Until then, if you have an MP3 player that has a painful native OS, and it’s on Rockbox’s “supported” (heck, or even “unsupported”) list, give Rockbox a try. I think you’ll be surprised.

– Trent

So this is less of a list of “my favorite browsers”… I don’t have one of those. Instead, I present you with my list of The 5 Browsers That Annoy Me The Least.

They all suck, but some less than others

I know, I know. There are plenty of people out there that will say “What do you mean? I LOVE $browser_of_choice! IT’S EVERYTHING I COULD EVER WANT IN A BROWSER AND MORE!”

And that’s fine. Everybody’s different, everybody has things that they like and dislike, and those aren’t the same for everyone. I get it.

But I’m pickier than most people when it comes to this stuff (which is why this blog is called “The Linux Critic”, and not “The Guy Who Loves Everything About Everything”). So I manage to find nitpicky things about just about every application I use. And since I use browsers probably more than any other application, don’t think for even a minute that I can’t find something nitpicky about any browser you set in front of me.

And in my opinion, while there’s a lot going on in the browser world right now — which is distinctly a good thing — there isn’t currently any browser out there with which I am 100% satisfied.

So without further ado, here’s my list of the ones that annoy me the least, in order of preference.

1. Firefox

This is possibly going to change once Firefox 4 comes out of beta, because from what I’m seeing, it’s got a pile of stuff that needs to be fixed and tweaked right out of the box before it’s even close to usable in my opinion. Way more than the current version of Firefox has anyway.

But for now, Firefox (3.6.13) is the top of my list. Sure, it’s probably the slowest, performance-wise, which is annoying, and I have to install no fewer than five add-ons in order to make up for its lack of basic, native functionality, and it also has the largest memory footprint out of any on my list as well.

That said, all things considered, it’s (relatively) stable, it’s (relatively) reliable when it comes to being able to render pages, execute code, and view web content on the widest array of pages on the Internet, and it’s by far the most flexible with regard to add-ons and available options for configuration.

I dislike that to fix some of its stupid native behavior I have to go into about:config… some of that stuff really just belongs in the Preferences. Generally speaking, in order to configure some of Firefox’s basic behavior, if I have to go into “about:config” to do it, it’s a fail.

But at least it’s possible to configure that behavior. Which gives Firefox a HUGE leg up on almost every other browser on my list. So here’s to you, Firefox 3.6.13. You annoy me the least!

2. Opera

Oh Opera. Where did you go wrong?

In a previous writeup on the subject, I went into the main reasons why I preferred Opera over Firefox.

Let me be clear here… I still think of those reasons as valid. Opera does many things better than Firefox, and is far faster on the same machines by comparison, and has far more native functionality, and has a better interface.

But in recent years, Opera has developed what I consider to be a horrific stability problem. It used to be rock solid, and now the constant random crashing — no matter what machine on which I am using it, no matter what OS — knocks it down to #2 on my list.

Couple that with a number of bugs that they simply refuse to address, and a lack of equivalent add-ons for certain things to which I have grown accustomed in the Firefox world, and well, you can see why it is no longer #1 for me.

I’d love to see Opera really give Firefox a run for its money, but so far it’s impressing me less and less with each major release. Opera 11 has added better add-on API which is a big step in the right direction, but much of what annoys me that caused me to drop it in favor of Firefox as my primary browser is still present. Too bad.

Add to this the fact that Opera has made a habit of not releasing their new versions for Linux until the Windows version has been out for weeks and sometimes months, and I’ve pretty much given up on trying to fight with this as my browser of choice. It’s still my secondary/backup browser, but it has lost favor with me to the point where I only use it if I have to (like if Firefox is giving me problems with a particular site or something).

3. Midori

A while back I wrote up a review of Midori 0.2.6 where I praised its speed, flexibility, and standards compliance.

Since then there has been at least one more release, and Midori is still a good enough browser to be my #3 on this list.

While Midori still has some issues with a few sites (unfortunately one of them being WordPress, which limits its usefulness to me) and some stability problems, I still have my eye on this browser because I think that it could give others a run for their money if it keeps improving.

4. Arora

Like Midori, Arora is a lightweight, simple browser that seems to be aiming for performance and ease of use over configurability. Unlike Midori (which is gtk+ based), Arora is built on QtWebKit, but like Midori it’s still cross platform, which is nice.

I like Arora’s speed and clean looks, but I wish it was as extensible as Firefox or at least had more built-in functionality to make up for that lack. In my testing of Arora I also found that it crashed pretty frequently too (even more than Midori tended to, which was often), which makes it difficult to use as my main browser for any length of time.

Still, I see some potential with Arora, and I keep checking back on it to see where the project has been going, because I hope that this browser will continue to improve. It’s definitely one to watch.

5. Chromium

Finally, last on my list, is the Chromium browser.

Last year I did review of Google Chrome for Linux, and my criticisms of Chromium are pretty much identical, even several months later.

The interface is painfully inflexible, there are options in the preferences that simply don’t work correctly (STILL!), there’s still a lack of add-ons that in my opinion adequately address these severe lacks of functionality and issues, and there’s still the somewhat underhanded way it updates itself with which I take issue.

That said, Chromium (like Chrome) is really fast and responsive, even on slow machines, it’s probably one of the most stable browsers I’ve ever tried, and it’s come a long way in terms of being able to render most sites correctly. But for me, Chromium is my last resort browser because the other issues are such a trainwreck for me that I can’t stand using it for very long.

Conclusion

So there you have it. I know, there are other browsers, but this was only a “top 5″ list. All the other browsers out there annoy me more than these five do, so they didn’t make the cut.

If I had my way, I’d make a Frankenstein browser. It would have:

Opera’s flexible interface and massive amount of native functionality

Firefox’s catalog of add-ons and some configurability (like the search box/tab behavior) that Opera doesn’t have

Chromium’s speed, stability, and small footprint

So, if one of you guys would get right on that, I’d be very thankful!

In the mean time, I’ll keep using Firefox, and hope for the best.

– Trent