Fox Flashing

Another dragon slayed! This time, I really needed to get Flash working in my Firefox browser. Mind you, I'm not crazy about it, and as I've mentioned in the past, I don't mind running another program temporarily to use Flash. It is just too abused by advertisers, as it is a good way to get around popup blockers. And the annoying blinking ads make me want to scream!

But if I wanted to listen to music or watch videos or even get the weather, I needed to have Flash running. The easiest way to do this seemed to be to install the www/linux-firefox port, as purportedly the Flash installer worked under FreeBSD's pretty solid Linux emulation layer. But it felt like it was going to be complicated, so I held off.

The I realized just how much I missed the Google Toolbar, especially its spellchecking. It wouldn't install in FreeBSD, but I did find one site that installed it in another Linux by removing the "platform specification" tag from the install.rdf file found in the XPI installer. So I tried to modify that, but the installer complained about "signing could not be verified", so it must have some kind of checksum for the file and noticed it had been changed. So that didn't work.

So I bit the bullet and installed the linux-firefox port. I was very afraid it was going to go off and pull in dozens of other ports and take all day to build, but it actually went very smoothly and finished in about 30 minutes. Here's the packages portmanager said it wanted:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Port Status Report
------------------------------------------------------------------------
00001 ----:linux-firefox-2.0                   /www/linux-firefox                  MISSING
00002 ----:linux-gtk2-2.6.10                   /x11-toolkits/linux-gtk2            MISSING
00003 ----:linux-atk-1.9.1                     /accessibility/linux-atk            MISSING
00004 ----:linux-pango-1.8.1                   /x11-toolkits/linux-pango           MISSING
00005 ----:linux-glib2-2.6.6                   /devel/linux-glib2                  MISSING
00006 have:linux-fontconfig-2.2.3_5            /x11-fonts/linux-fontconfig         CURRENT
00007 ----:linux-hicolor-icon-theme-0.5_1      /x11-themes/linux-hicolor-icon-theme MISSING
00008 have:linux_base-fc-4_9                   /emulators/linux_base-fc4           CURRENT
00009 have:rpm-3.0.6_13                        /archivers/rpm                      CURRENT
00010 have:linux-jpeg-6b.34                    /graphics/linux-jpeg                CURRENT
00011 ----:linux-png-1.2.8_2                   /graphics/linux-png                 MISSING
00012 ----:linux-tiff-3.7.1                    /graphics/linux-tiff                MISSING
00013 have:linux-xorg-libs-6.8.2_5             /x11/linux-xorg-libs                CURRENT
00014 have:linux-expat-1.95.8                  /textproc/linux-expat               CURRENT
00015 have:hicolor-icon-theme-0.9_2            /misc/hicolor-icon-theme            CURRENT
00016 have:gmake-3.81_1                        /devel/gmake                        CURRENT
00017 have:automake-1.4.6_2                    /devel/automake14                   CURRENT
00018 have:autoconf-2.13.000227_5              /devel/autoconf213                  CURRENT
00019 have:libtool-1.5.22_2                    /devel/libtool15                    CURRENT
00020 have:popt-1.7_1                          /devel/popt                         CURRENT
00021 have:gettext-0.14.5_2                    /devel/gettext                      CURRENT
00022 have:perl-5.8.8                          /lang/perl5.8                       CURRENT
00023 have:m4-1.4.4                            /devel/m4                           CURRENT
00024 have:libiconv-1.9.2_2                    /converters/libiconv                CURRENT

So not too bad, really. Eight missing packages and all built without a problem. So I jump back into X and run 'linux-firefox'. It turns out to be Firefox 2.0, which was a pleasant surprise and it picked up most of my extensions without a problem. Only my Colorful Tabs extension wasn't up to date, and even that had one ready to go. And it looks pretty nice, a little better than my native version did, even after my tweaks.

So I head on over the Pandora and click on the "Missing Plugin" box. It skips over to Macromedia and downloads the Flash player, which installs without a hitch. Back to Pandora and now I have a working Pandora music player. And now YouTube.com works fine as does pretty much everything else. I am psyched!

Google Toolbar installed just fine too, although ironically enough, with Firefox 2.0's builtin spell checker, I don't really need it as much as I did before!