Setting Chromium to use the search engine of your choice

Chromium, like all good browsers is very flexible and allows you change things around, which is good, as one of it's default features can be very annoying. The feature , is that it auto detects which country you are in , and when you do a search it returns the information in the language of that country. This is great if you want that, but can be a real pain in the backside if you don't. As I travel between France and the UK very regularly, I need to be able to have the search engine, where ever I am, and this little trick sorts that out for you.

Well there is a easy way to fix that.

1) Go to the wrend menu and select options
2) Then click on manage search engines
3) Click on add to create a new one
4) Make it look like the picture below - substitue your country as appropriate.
5) Make it one of the defaults
6) Now test it with a search in the omnibar for something



The other great part of this is you can also set up other custom search engines for all your favourite sites , and I have set one up for the Linux Man pages , which I found on another site.

So if I now want to look up the man page for a command, I just type man command in the omnibox, and it takes me straight there.

See this picture on how I did that one.

Google web apps appear on the latest Chromium builds

I have been following the development of the ChromiumOS, and one the things I liked was the way that my often used apps would appear on a menu page and be easy to load. There is nothing revolutionary about at present, apart from it's convenience and the potential of what Google has up it's sleeve for the next generation of browser based web apps.

Well, you don't have to wait for the release of ChromiumOS anymore as you can have a play with them now, thanks to these articles

Download Squad

Google Chromium blog

Basically you need to add a start up option to your Chromium start button/icon which is --enable-apps. Once this is down, download the crx files from the second link onto your harddrive, and then just drag and drop them onto Chromium. If you know press Ctrl-t , you will see the web apps displayed. Click on one and it will appear on the left of the browser.

Now, if like me you follow the PPA chromium development build, then you will find that the web apps mentioned - gmail etc - in the first article are not in place in /usr/lib/chromium/resources, so use the ones from the second article instead.

If you look at my picture above you will see the web apps on the far left of the browser screen.

There is also some interesting discussions happening on the web about what these offer over a normal extension, apart from the pretty icon above the tab, I think currently , this is showing what will be available , and how it is going to progress rather than astounding us now.

Ubuntu takes another step towards the MAC UI and away from original UI

This change has been designed for the next release of the netbook remix - 10.10 maverick, but works perfectly on my Lucid 10.04 desktop setup. What is it , you may ask, well it's the moving of the application menu from the application window itself, and onto the Panel menu, at the top of your screen, just like the MAC does when you open an application. I have to say I like it , and I will be using it for a while to see how it goes.

This is what it looks like while using gedit.



It is definitely something worth having a look at and having a play with.

Here is the post on how to set it up, and make sure that you edit the file /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80appmenu , and change this setting APPMENU_DISPLAY_BOTH=0. Then restart your windows session by logging off and then back on again.

The Indicator Panel - from Jono Bacons blog

Firefox Beta 1 release candidate out in the wild

There have been quite a few changes between 3.7 alpha and the 4.0 beta 1 release. There is a definite change in performance again, which is always good to see. They have added a new bookmark icon on the top Chrome area which works well, and along side that is added a Feedback button to help you get more involved in the beta testing process. Whether that will continue into the final release is not clear at this stage.

They are going to change the arrangement of the tabs at the top of the window, but this has not been implemented on the Linux or Mac versions yet, but we are told it's coming shortly. Update with the release of the beta this morning , having the tabs on top is now working on Linux.

The add-ons menu has been changed and makes it very easy to navigate all your plugins, themes and extensions. See the picture below.



The Mozilla sync - which was weave - is now fully integrate and works seamlessly with the new browser.

There are also many under the hood changes which I feel will make a lot of difference to the developer community and offer extra facilities for the end user like HTML5 video codec support using WebM

See here

Get it here

July is the month for new Browsers for Linux

I have been using all the latest browsers from the main standards compliant camp lately, as the heat is turned up with performance and functionality.

Well July 2010 is a real watershed in the available browsers for Linux with the arrival of the long awaited Opera 10.60 - which is a very polished, fast and extremely enjoyable browser to use. It has delivered on the long awaited promises that it has alluded to over the years. Google Chromium now has another real competitor on their hands, no doubt about that.



Also , while checking the Mozilla Firefox nightlies this morning - an oxymoron ;-) - I found that the availability of the next major release is getting prepared for it's beta testing phase on or around the 5th July. I have been using the 3.7Alpha5 for most of June, and this is what I believe will become the version 4.0 beta1, and it is a lot faster on Ubuntu 10.04 than 3.6 is, and it is now as close to Chromium and Opera as to not really be a deciding factor.

There is no doubt that Chromium stirred things up for ever when they appeared for good. We are now reaping the rewards of that entry into the browser arena, and as consumers of browsers we should all be grateful for that.

It does however now present the average Linux user with a fantastic dilemma, which browser should I use today? There is not an easy answer for that I have to admit.

I use Google Chromium now on a daily basis, as I like it's speed, auto-sync and extensions, but there are still a few rough edges , which occasionally mean I have to switch back to using Firefox to get work done. I'm working with the developers to make this situation better by reporting bugs as I find them, but it's not always easy, when you just want to get things done.

I also now have another contender in the form of Opera to switch to , as it also has far less problems with IE specific web sites, and now offers so much it really can't be ignored.

Looking at the next release of Ubuntu 10.10 with Virtualbox

As the first Alpha iso was placed up on the mirrors for us all to start having a play , I decided to run it up in a virtual machine and see what - if anything - has changed. The install went fine, with my first run I just followed the usual install options , clicking next, and then install. All went fine until right at the end it had to removed some information with "dpkg" and then it started to error. I clicked through these and it finished, in what on the surface seemed to be a successful and stable install. Once rebooted however, I noticed there was something wrong with the way packages were not being installed , so I decided that this initial release had issues. I did have a good look at the errors that were being generated, and it was obvious that those errors on install, were more of a problem than I had originally thought.

Not a big problem, as I left it over the weekend , knowing come Monday on the daily builds the problem would almost certainly be fixed, and it was.

So, rather than download the latest daily iso image, I used the really useful zsync utility to just upgrade my iso - look here on how to use this utility.

Once all was installed and up and running, I had a look around. At this early stage there is not a great deal to see, except the latest kernel 2.6.35 (see the picture above). Gnome is the same and most of the apps are the same, as far as I can tell, except the software centre which has had an upgrade and looks a much improved. I'm sure most of the underlying apps have had their versions bumped, but to the eye it looks very similar to Lucid, not surprisingly.

I installed Google Chrome to see how that worked with the new OS, and all went well. It is worth doing this, as under the virtual image this gives you just that little extra performance.

At least the Meerkat is out of the cage now so I can keep an eye on where this great distribution is heading next in it's evolutionary track.

Google chrome stable is released for Linux and Mac

Well, I have been working with the beta version of chrome and the developer version of chromium since they were released and have seen them grow into great browsers that deserve their place amongst the best on the web.

So it was a momentous day when we got a full release version on the Linux - and Mac - platforms that will now be compared to other stable versions available for these platforms , like Firefox and Safari.

There are no particular new features in this release, as the last beta had most of the news, but this is just to give a base line from which to build.

They have mentioned that when Adobe launch their flash player in a few weeks - version 10.1 - then this will be built into the browser, which is great for us , but could be a major problem for Apple and Microsoft.

You’ll be able to synchronize not only bookmarks across multiple computers, but also browser preferences -- including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, preferred languages, and even page zoom settings. Meanwhile, for avid extensions users, you can enable each extension to work in incognito mode through the extensions manager.

The stable release also incorporates HTML5 features such as Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop. For a taste of HTML5’s powerful features, try browsing through websites developed in HTML5 such as scribd.com, dragging and dropping attachments in Gmail, or by enabling the geolocation functionality in Google Maps. We’ve also given Chrome’s bookmark manager a facelift with HTML5.

I have been testing this Browser on my Ubuntu 10.04 laptops in both 32 and 64 bit versions and found it to be fast, stable and reliable. I do use Chromium on a day to day basis as I like to help debug the future of the browser, but will turn to Chrome for it's stability when I need to book flights or do my on-line banking.

I can recommend you give it a go and just see the speed difference you will experience.

Download it here Get Google Chrome Stable