Firefox crashing on startup on Mageia 2

I use Firefox as my web browser of preference on my Mageia 2 system and today when I clicked the icon to start it, I was greeted with just the application bar briefly before it crashed. I tried restarting it and still the same thing happened but this time I noticed that the Adblock Plus was showing on the title bar before it disappeared.

Doing a quick Google on this behavior led me to a post that this happens when an add-on thinks it's compatible with the current version of Firefox. To fix this, I needed to run Firefox in "Safe Mode" and disable all add-ons.

The command to start in "Safe Mode" is:

$ firefox -safe-mode

And you will be greeted with a dialog box where you can tick the checkbox to disable all add-ons.

Once I restarted, Firefox worked fine.

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Firefox (ESR) version as of this post: 10.0.10
Adblock Plus version as of this post: 2.2

Back to Mageia 2

I'm using Mageia 2 again on my primary personal laptop after using Centos 5.8 for more than a month.

The decision was somewhat accidental. I came across this post and I wanted to try it out because I am using a laptop with a 1024x768 resolution. So I installed Debian Wheezy to try that out. Long story short, I was too lazy to configure Xmonad so I decided to just install an out-of-the-box distro.

I was choosing between Mageia and openSUSE. But since I like Mageia (and I have it working on a virtual machine on my work laptop), I decided to go with it. What I have installed now is a vanilla installation of the Mageia KDE and so far, it's working nicely.

It's really awesome that Mageia got my D-Link DWA-125 USB wireless dongle working out of the box which is impressive and helpful since I don't need to install/compile the driver myself.

Mageia 2 and Razor-qt

Well, well, well...I finally managed to get Razor-qt desktop environment on my virtual Mageia 2 box!

After reading this post by user Linux and seeing the screenshots over at Razor-qt website I felt I just had to try it out.

Above is a sample screenshot with a few tweaks done to the panel.

Setting up a wireless nework connection via command line

Update: These commands only works for unsecured SSIDs, apparently (and obviously).

Having set up a working wireless connection to the network, it was time to get it connected. I decided to use the command line way to connect to the network.

[usr@host ~]$ su -
Password:
[usr@host ~]# ifconfig <interface> down
[usr@host ~]# dhclient -r <interface>
[usr@host ~]# ifconfig <interface> up
[usr@host ~]# iwconfig <interface> essid "<essid_in_quotes>"
[usr@host ~]# iwconfig <interface> mode Managed
[usr@host ~]# dhclient <interface>

Getting the DWA-125 Wireless Dongle to Work in CentOS 5.8

I use an old IBM Thinkpad X32 which doesn't come with a built-in wireless networking card. Fortunately, I still have my D-Link DWA-125 wireless USB adapter lying around. I used this on a previous computer before and it didn't let me down. I was hoping that this time around, it wouldn't let me down either; and I can say that it didn't as I am typing this post using the successful setup of a wireless connection. This time around, I am using CentOS 5.8 as my operating system. Here's how I got it working.