New Zealand Linux

I’ve been wanting to move the old debian.co.nz onto a more generic name since its more than just debian. Its about Linux.

Ive also made the move for the first time into using somebody elses software for the site rather than my own home rolled stuff, as i really just dont have the time anymore.

Greets go out to those who helped with migrating posts (you can see who they are by who posted em!).

As for more news. The debian and ubnutu repository is going, and the server is now moved offshore. Orcon refused to respond when asked for more bandwidth and 128k international wasnt enough to maintain it. Also gone is the FTP with ISO images, for the same reason.

I have no hard feelings however, I now host on a rimuhosting VPS which has excellent resources, and saves me the hassle of having to deal with hardware and upgrades (PS, I work as a sysadmin at Rimu – and its the most awesome place to work.)

My goal now is to turn the website into more of a community hub for NZ Linux people both new and old, and geeks in general. I welcome you all to post news, gadgets, your own projects, or even how you managed to install Linux on the toaster.

When you post, just post as a Draft, ill review and approve. If I notice anyone who seems particularly into it, i will happily make you an admin who can approve or help manage the website.

Following on from some stuff I wrote in my blog about making Firefox look a bit more native on OS X. Just to prove I’m still a Linux user, here’s more of the same for Linux…

Firefox does a pretty good job of pretending to be a Gnome application, but it gets it wrong in a couple of places.

1. Toolbar images.

The toolbar images in Firefox are not the same as in Gnome or KDE applications, and the gnomestripe and kdestripe theme jar files that can be generated optionally when compiling Firefox seem not to be included by most distributions. I extracted them from a Mandrake RPM and have made them available for download…kdestripe gnomestripe

Once downloaded, you may need to use this page to install them. Strangely the page doesn’t work unless it’s saved and viewed locally. After this the Gnome or KDE theme can be selected from Tools->Themes.

Users of the Ximian Industrial Gtk theme might appreciate this theme which makes Firefox feel even more like a real Gnome application.

2. Form controls.

Form controls are the proper name for the little buttons and drop down menus that you see on a page. The standard buttons supplied for anything except windows look like rejects from the Motif tryouts and don’t fit well with any theme. Fortunately using one of these Form widget hacks you should be able to get something looking a bit more like your theme…

For themes with V like arrows on scrollbars like BlueCurve
For themes with wedge like arrows on scrollbars (most themes)

Once you’ve downloaded the files and extracted the contents, you need to move the files from the /res/ directory into your /lib/mozilla-firefox/res/ directory (or whatever it’s called on your system). Restart firefox, and presto you’ll see the new form controls instead of the old chiselled looking ones.

3. Tabs.

The tabs in Firefox have no close button, instead a close-button is shown at the end of the tab bar. This is the correct behavior for KDE, but wrong for Gnome. A nice extension to correct this problem is tabx, which puts close buttons on each tab and eliminates the close button from the end of the tab bar.

The tabs also use a bold font on the focused tab, this is wrong behavior for both Gnome and KDE. It can be corrected by using the tip on this page.

The result

Before…
After…
Last-Modified: 2007-03-07 19:38:50