Another day with Camino

According to the Camino web site, search engines can be added, but there's no GUI for it and it requires editing a file. I bought my Mac to avoid things like that.

New Likes

Camino hasn't frozen or spiked my CPU all day. You can be sure Firefox would have by now.

The multi-tab bookmark can be opened like a regular bookmark folder just by click and holding. This way there's still easy access to individual sites in the folder if you don't want to open the whole set.

New Dislikes

No find bar. I use the Firefox find bar all the time. It's a much more useful implementation of searching within a page than the typical control-F box. I know Camino has find-as-you-type. But i doesn't work very well, in that (a) I hate having to remeber keystrokes like slash, command-G ,and command-shift-G, and (b) find next and find previous operations are only available for a few seconds after a hit.

No form field suggestions. Firefox remembers the values I have typed into a form field. I just bought a bunch of Southwest tickets and I had to type in my girlfriend's email address every time.

Camino: Initial Impressions

It wasn't until last night that I finally got around to installing Mozilla's Camino web browser on my MacBook (version 1.0.4). I've been seeing it mentioned more frequently, so it's been on my mind. Given my increasing frustration over Firefox lockups and dirty quits, it's a perfect time to make Camino my default browser, at least on a trial basis.

I like the idea of Camino being more of a "true" OS X application, but I confess that Firefox's lack of "Mac-ness" never really phased me. Integration with keychain? That's nice...I guess. But in my work I am often forced to use client-provided laptops, and it's a big time saver to copy my Firefox passwords -- along with all other settings -- to theses Windows machines. Cross-platform support is one of the big reasons I use Firefox.

I'm also a little nervous about Camino's lack of customization options. To be fair, a better way to say it is that Firefox is outrageously customizable and Camino is reasonably customizable. I'm not a manic consumer of Firefox extensions, but I do have my favorites. And I love being able to add search engines to the search control; I'd be more willing to use Safari if it had this feature. Nevertheless, I'm willing to give Camino a chance; it does for example, have integrated "annoynace blocking", which I accomplish in Firefox through extensions.

I imported my Firefox bookmarks easily. I was a little surprised, given their common heritage, that Camino didn't provide an option for importing other settings from Firefox, especially passwords.

The first feature that I love: multi-tab bookmarks. A single click on my Camino bookmark bar now populates the window with four tabs containing my favorite websites.

The first feature that I hate: hovering over My Yahoo! news headlines doesn't float an abstract of the story. This could be a deal-breaker.

Compaq Armada M300 And Linux

I had very good luck with BeaFanatix on the under-powered Tecra 550CDT, so that's the first thing I tried on the Armada. Everything went well -- it boots up very quickly from the CD and of course even faster after it's installed -- but I did have Firefox crash a couple of times while on YouTube.

I tried Xubuntu 6.10, and while the Live CD booted fine, the machine wouldn't boot into X11 after installation.

I tried Xubuntu 7.04, but that locked up at 15% during installation.

I tried Ubuntu 7.04, but that wouldn't detect the network card.

Needless to say, BFX is looking pretty good again.

Windows XP On The Shuttle

I've got Sherry's copy of Windows XP installed and activated. Put it on automatic updates mode. It seems to be up to date now with Microsoft fixes.

Installed the audio drivers that I got off the Shuttle ST62K support site; the audio didn't work without them. Also installed the VGA drivers from the site; the scrolling in a web browser was much smoother afterward.

Installed both Firefox and IE 7, and got flash setup for both. Tested watching Grey's Anatomy "fullscreen" at abc.com and it played very smoothly, only stuttering a couple of times throughout the episode.

Installed iTunes, activated Sherry's Apple account for the Shuttle, and imported all of her music from the old computer. The playlists got a little jacked up, but I did an import one of the files in the iTunes directory and that fixed it.

Installed updates for the Pioneer DVR-A09XL DVD drive (updated firmware, and some update that's supposed to make it run more quietly during video playback) taken from the support site. I can't find the CD that came with the drive, so I'm trying to install open source DVD burning software. I installed InfraRecorder and erased an old CD-RW. My only complaint was that the software looked like it had locked up during the procedure -- progress was stuck at 0% the entire time -- but within 10 minutes it popped out the disc and indicated that it had been erased successfully. I burned a copy of Xubuntu 7.04, and according to the log it was "successfully fixated". InfraRecorder's GUI might be a bit quirky.

I noticed that there's no mention of USB 2.0 in the Device Manager. I downloaded the USB 2.0 file from the Shuttle site but it turned out to be a text file containing very brief instructions for getting USB 2.0 to work. They make it sound like I should already see a USB 2.0 host controller in my device manager. The instructions on the Microsoft web site were also decidedly unhelpful.

I went back out to the Shuttle site, grabbed the "chipset driver", and installed it. It installed a few things, but not USB 2.0 support. I downloaded the Shuttle manual (installing Adobe Reader in the process) and it refers to the USB 2.0 installation included on the Shuttle CD...which I seem to have misplaced. HOwever, a little Googling indicates that I may be worrying about nothing; the reference in the Device Manager to "Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller" apparently means I have USB 2.0 already.