After getting back from vacation in Vegas I decided I needed to sort my laptop out once and for all. So partitioned the drive in two, one with Vista Ultimate and one with Fedora 9.

On top of this I really wanted the Fedora partition to be encrypted and using LVM so I can resize later, glad I did that.

However in all I had two problems along the way,

Fedora 9 Wifi doesn't support TKIP

The first thing which I couldn't fix was the Wifi. I was using WPA+TKIP which is available in the network configuration panel, all good but everytime I tried to connect it'd popup the password entry screen again; really annoying.

Thankfully I found the reason to this, Fedora 9 does not support TKIP even though it's available in the control panel; switching to WPA+AES clears that problem.

Just wish they documented that better ;-)

32-bit Flash on a 64-bit build

Adobe released the Flash 9 libraries to the linux community but only as 32-bit binaries, I installed Fedora using the 64-bit build so with some tweaking managed to fix that too.

• Adding Flash to Fedora

In Terminal do:

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm'
su -c 'yum install flash-plugin'

Now specifically for 64-bit Fedora builds do:

su -c "yum -y install nspluginwrapper.{i386,x86_64} pulseaudio-libs.i386 libflashsupport.i386"
su -c 'mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v'

Afterwards close & reopen Firefox and you should now have Flash 9 running on your Fedora 9 64-bit desktop.

I'm probably wrong and everything, but last night I got an update of Firefox 3 thru the Synaptic package manager on Ubuntu Hardy and now it sort of looks like it's out early.

Any ideas?

Quick Note. Unlike Firefox, Internet Explorer handles password fields a little differently, blanking out whatever value you pass it within a 'value' tag.

So...

Will have a password box in Firefox starred out, but in IE it'll appear blank.

To get around this you can use Prototype to inject a value into the password field, so the user see's it as starred out.

$('mypass').value='**';

Note, if you're generating the form dynamically with...

var innerhtml='

Only fire your $('mypass') code after the form has been written to the page otherwise you won't be able to get a handle on it (most cases you won't ever have this problem).

More really decent Firefox Addons...

• ColorZilla
  ...provides an eyedropper, like photoshop

• ThrashMail.net
  ...dummy email address generator

• FFmyIp
  ...displays your machine's ip address

• LoremIpsum Content Generator
  ...generates lorem ipsum text for your web designs

• FireFtp
  ...ftp file manager addon for firefox

• FireBug
  ...the best web debugger in history

• Web Developer Toolbar
  ...very competent web design addon

• Delicious Toolbar
  ...add your del.ici.ous links to firefox

• YSlow
  ...addon to FireBug, ranks your sites performance and offers solutuions to speed it up

• FireCookie
  ...addon to FireBug, gives you total control of cookies

• Tails
  ...Microformats statusbar extension, lights up when it sees microformat code in a webpage

• PicLens
  ...instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen 3D experience for viewing images across the web

All tested to work with the latest Firefox 2.0.0.11 build.

Unit Testing

• Selenium IDE - Firefox Plugin