note to self....

Okay, here's a solution to one that's been bugging me for awhile:

The problem is that Mozilla Firefox 1.x under SuSE 9.2 KDE 3.3 has some weirdness with the text select foreground / background color. The fix for this was found [tweaked] from http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#prefs.

This fix is documented on the mozilla.org website for Mozilla, but this works [seems to] for Mozilla Firefox [curr ver 1.5.0.4], as well.

The tweak was that my X server didn't like the color names that were used in the example from the website - not sure why "green" or "white" are not being mapped by the X RGB color database, but using the [somewhat] standard HTML color hex number format ('#rrggbb', where rr == red, gg == green, bb == blue, and each color is a 2-digit (8-bit) hexadecimal color component value) seems to work fine.

Note that this fix might be possible in the ${ff_user_app_dir}/chrome/userChrome.css file, but I haven't found the CSS definitions of Firefox user interface elements, yet. That should exist, I believe, but it may be wrapped some sort of XUL implementation verbiage.

Anyway - here are the pertinent entries from my newly created ${ff_user_prof_dir}/user.js file [user.js did not exist by default for Firefox - simply create it and add whatever of the available Javascsript UI style commands are desired - the page linked above has more examples]:

// Set select colors for text:
user_pref("ui.textSelectBackground", "#00ff00");
user_pref("ui.textSelectForeground", "#000000");
// Select color for typeahead find is slightly different:
user_pref("ui.textSelectBackgroundAttention", "blue");
// Not clear when/if widgetSelectBackground ever gets called: let's find out.
user_pref("ui.widgetSelectBackground", "orange");

Notes:

For the shell variables used above -

${ff_user_app_dir} - this is the user's application config and state directory (typically something like $HOME/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/)

${ff_user_prof_dir} - this is the Firefox user profile directory (typically something like $HOME/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/${profilename} where ${profilename} is a string randomly generated for the [default] profile when Firefox starts up - usually the first time.

Labels: 1.5, 3.3, 9.2, color, config, firefox, fix, hack, kde, linux, mozilla, rgb, suse, x

Why does kamix take more memory than Emacs?  I mean, for that matter, why does Emacs take more memory than Firefox?  Still, wtF?  Fully graphical web browser - Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.2 is listed in top as taking 0.5% of memory (we're talking 512M here, I believe) - and that's running maximized and with the Performancing blogging extension open.

GNU Emacs, on the other hand - a text editor with a text inerface, but running under X (so I guess there are a few widgets allocated there) - Emacs is taking up (again: according to top) 3.7% of RAM, with no files open, and no child processes running (?). 

Now, this is nothing, really (3.7%) as we look up the list from bottom to top - in the same vicinity as Emacs on this listing (sorted by %MEM) we have such notable applications and services as kalarmd (3.8%), gkrellm (3.3%), and (less than 3%) xterm, artsd, etc.  No, this is nothing - we're in the lightweight end of the listing - let's look closer to the top.

Let's see ... kdeinit (4.1%), kdeinit (4.2%), kdeinit (4.5%) ... the list goes on - altogether there are something like 16 instances of kdeinit running, each of them taking up more RAM individually than either Emacs or Firefox - more, in fact than any other of the 15-odd applications running except for e.g. X (7.9%), kgpg (6.3%), kamix (5.4%) ... whoops - wait, I've overlooked something: firefox-bin is running up at the top, consuming some 12.7% - followed by the #1 instance of kdeinit (10.5%) second, and X itself (7.9%) third....

So please ignore what I said about Firefox at the beginning - that was 'firefox' the script that starts 'firefox-bin' - everything else was [i think] pretty accurate.

Labels: kde, linux, memory

And furthermore, why is the sound Notification system in KDE such a piece of crap?

First it was Konsole - SCREAMING at me each time I touched the Backspace key while the cursor was at the beginning of the line -WtF? Now it's Konqueror BLASTING the same damned noise at me each time I push the down arrow key to scroll down the page!?

And on my system, each of those staticy, noisy, piece of shit system beeps is about 100Db - that is, I have this PoS notebook plugged into a rather high-powered speaker system (not that the crappy system beep isn't too loud even on crappy little laptop speakers), and no matter what I do, it seems that KDE just won't agree to either shut up with the stupid system beeps, or even just turn them down to something a lot lower in amplitude than what I want from e.g. XMMS or JuK or whatever media player I'm using to blast rock'n'roll to the rest of the neighborhood...

Put it on the to do list to fix this crap...

Labels: kde, keyboard, konsole, linux, sound