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My laptop died quite a while ago, and until recently I’d been too lazy to get it fixed. I have it warrantied from Dell until the end of 2007. With a move coming up, I decided I wanted it working so I’d have a computer to use before I got everything completely set up. I did an online chat with support, and sent it back to them. They sent it back, having done nothing but blow dust out of the heatsink, but it seems to work most of the time now, but still has the same problem it did before once in a while. If I put pressure on it in just the right way, it turns itself off. When it first started happening, I looked around the web for anything about it but couldn’t find anything. I guess I haven’t checked in a long time, because there’s now lots of information about the problem on the web. For the time being, it works well enough, and I’m not sending it back again until I’ve moved and gotten a desktop set up.
When I got it back and working again, I first tried to do a crossgrade from Debian sid that was installed on it to Ubuntu, but that failed pretty badly. So I trashed the filesystem (leaving my home directory intact), and did a fresh Ubuntu install. I’m very impressed. The installation basically didn’t ask me any questions, detected all my hardware, and works great, right out of the box. The default setup is pretty darn good, and all I did was some desktop customization.
I also finally got sick of Firefox not blocking popups on some websites. So I did a painstaking web search (er.. Googled for “firefox popups” and checked out the first hit), and found this:
It turns out that some clever people figured out that you could launch popups from Flash, getting around the Firefox default settings.
Fortunately, you can get around it:
1. Type about:config into the Firefox location bar.
2. Right-click on the page and select New and then Integer.
3. Name it privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins
4. Set the value to 2.The possible values are:
* 0: Allow all popups from plugins.
* 1: Allow popups, but limit them to dom.popup_maximum.
* 2: Block popups from plugins.
* 3: Block popups from plugins, even on whitelisted sites.
Seems to have worked.
Let’s see, other stuff. Now that my laptop (mostly) works, I figured I want faster wireless. 108mbps sounded good. This card should actually work in Linux, too. I should have them pretty soon. I may actually get a bigger hard drive for my laptop, too. 30gb might not cut it for much longer, and 80gb or 100gb laptop drives aren’t that expensive. Plus, I now know how to take the hard drive out of my laptop. I’m also getting a USB Bluetooth adapter, so I can try to use my Treo as a modem for my laptop, wirelessly. No clue how that’s gonna turn out. I looked around to find a device that Linux could use, and found this page, which seriously pissed me off.
The current statement why I can’t list the products that are known to be working with Linux goes like this:
Whether or not you’re selling them makes no difference. The problem is due to the distribution of them from your Web site. Please note that the use and distribution of non-qualified products is a violation of the Bluetooth License Agreement. As neither of these products have been qualified using Linux it is illegal to make them available for public use.
Luckily, thanks to the Internet Archive, I was able to look at a slightly outdated list.
Anyway, I managed to type this whole post without the laptop shutting off, so I think I’ll just click Publish and not push my luck.
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Yeah, we’ve had issues with people embedding flash with popups in comments and stuff on Myspace. I don’t suppose you’ve found a way to stop this on the server-side, eh?
I realize this is an old post, but I think this is helping with the pop-ups. Thanks.