Installing flash player plug in for Firefox and Chrome on Fedora 12 - x64

To install flash player plugin for Firefox or chrome(beta) on Fedora:

For Firefox

cd cd /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/

For Google chrome

cd /opt/google/chrome/plugins/

(if plugins directory does not exist, create it)

then:

1- wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

2- tar xvzf libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

3- rm -f libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

Restart the browser and you are done!

I just programmed for 8 miles....

I just got back from POSSE (Professors Open Source Summer Experience) hosted by Red Hat. It was quite an experience indeed.

I met new people with the same goal, shared experiences and learnt the way open source communites work. It gave me many ideas that I am going to work on one by one and you'll read about it here as I go through them. (read them in my blog at http://seneblog.fardad.com)

It is true that I learnt many things about Open Source, but I saw something in Red Hat head quarters that I think it will change the way I work for rest of my life;

Like all other geeks I am always glued to my computer screen in worst posture possible. It gives me back pain, neck pain and after few hours of coding, I feel like I can not stand up straight any more.

Greg, during the final hours of POSSE was talking about how he walks and works on his treadmill at home and then he took us down to the offices of those working at Red Hat and there is was; a treadmill/desk hybrid!!!. It was literary a treadmill with a tall (with adjustable height) desk attached in front of it.

Taking Greg's advice on how it can cause neck pain because of looking down for a long time, I made few improvements and converted my own treadmill to a workstation; The notebook monitor is at the eye level, so while walking on treadmill I will look forward instead of down, I added an additional monitor for dual head (multiple screen) capability and also set two height settings for the keyboard (so my wife can use it too).

It took me a day and a half and 100 Dollars to build it and since then (24 hours ago) I burned 1300 calories!!

Here it is at work:

Now the only problem I have is to fight with my wife on who is going to jump on the treadmill to work(out)!!!

I will blog with closeup shots on keyboard stand and monitor stand, so if you like to convert your treadmill to a work station, you can get an idea of how it is done.

Toshiba and its help desk

Today I also want to talk about Toshiba's help desk.

I got this notebook from work, not by choice! Not that it is not a good one, it is pretty fair.
It is a 64 bit computer so you would assume it would come with a 64 OS. It didn't!

I got the vista 64 and installed it. lots of drivers missing, graphics didn't work, etc....

So I went to Toshiba's support website and selected the model (Toshiba satellite pro p200 psp...) and found out that there is not a single 64 bit driver provided from the manufacturer. The funny thing is that when I went to the ATI (graphic card's manufacturer) website to find the driver, they redirected me to Toshiba!

So I called Toshiba's help desk. Someone who I think have never heard what is "64bit" answered and started browsing Toshiba's website for me behind the phone!!! as if I can't do that myself! She told me: "I can't see anything here". Of course you can't, if you could, I would not have called you!!!! I am very displeased with Toshiba's help desk and sadly I don't have a choice.

Any way, I applied all the updates from Microsoft and magically, through update the proper drivers were installed. (happy ending!, see my previous blog)

I miss my Dell.

Installing Fedora 9 on Toshiba Satellite Pro P200 and having trouble with monitor settings

So I wanted to install Fedora 9 on my Toshiba Satellite Pro P200-JS5. It comes with two hards which makes it ideal for a dual boot (Fedora/Vista). Its also good to know that the computer comes with mobile ATI Radeon HD 2400.

Right from the beginning when I selected the GUI installation, when it wanted to switch to GUI the monitor acted weird as if a white liquid starting to fill all the screen until it all went white.

I restarted the installation and this time went with text mode. No problem! Everything went smooth. When I restarted the system, I got the same problem again!

After discussing this with an expert friend I found out that apparently this is because fedora is using the wrong frequencies for the monitor, so I tried finding out what are the proper HorizSync an VertRefresh for /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier   "Monitor0"
HorizSync    30.0 - 85.0
VertRefresh  58.0 - 62.0
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier  "Videocard0"
Driver      "radeon"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device     "Videocard0"
Monitor    "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth     24
SubSection "Display"
Depth     24
Modes "1400x900"
EndSubSection
EndSection

which didn't work. So I started googling the problem, no luck. I fiddled around the set up and tried many different configurations, nothing worked!

finally I said to myself, the heck with it, let me apply the updates and just go with text mode:

$yum update

I applied around 25 new installs and around 400 updates and my fedora was updated from 2.6.25-14.fc9.x86_64 to 2.6.26.5-45.fc9.x86_64.

I rebooted the computer and there you go, everything worked perfectly as if nothing was wrong right from the beginning.

So friends, before wasting your time for 2 days fiddling around things to fix on a new install, first apply the updates. Lightning may strike!!!!

Cheers...

Starting to blog

Well, this is kind of recursive blog.

I am blogging the fact that I just started to blog for the first time!

Hello world, here I come...