This is part one of a short series of articles detailing the process I went through to restore a friend’s table pc after her hard drive dies due to a head crash.
Background
My friend has a Gateway CX210X Convertible Notebook. This model uses a SATA internal drive. Her drive died sometime last Friday afternoon while working in Windows. You got the standard click of the drive arm against the platter that wouldn’t stop.
I tried some basic restoration techniques to see if I could at least see the drive:
Nothing worked. So I went out and bought a new hard drive for her from one of the local computer places in Valdosta, Belson’s pcXchange.
Installation Problems
At this point I thought I was going to be homefree, boy was I wrong. The first hurdle was getting the Windows install cd to even see the hard drive. Apparently the bios for the CX210X does not have a legacy option to allow the SATA controller to be seen as a standard IDE controller. No problem, I can just use a USB floppy drive to load the drivers before the install, right? Wrong.
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One of the small annoyances I have with Firefox is the default URL used for the Google search plug-in. While I generally just type in a search term and hit enter, I do sometimes just hit enter without a corresponding search term just to get sent to the main Google page. Why do I do this? Mainly so that I can view the updated Google logos when they change for holidays.
With a default installation of Firefox the default Google page is the Mozilla Firefox Start Page. While this is nice from a corporate branding sense, this special page does not have the links to either iGoogle or the Google Accounts login page, nor does is feature the often customized Google logo. Also, none of the other search plug-ins that I have tested in Firefox exhibit a similar “feature”, they all dump you at the default page for that particular service.
Here’s how to change all of that.
Firefox 2.x for Mac OS X
- Quit Firefox.
- In the Finder, navigate to /Applications
- Right-click (or control-click) on Firefox.app and select Show Package Contents from the context menu
- In the window that comes navigate to Contents -> MacOS -> searchplugins
- Open the file named google.xml in your favorite text editor
- Change the value for the XML attribute named SearchForm as follows:
Default: http://www.google.com/firefox
Changed: http://www.google.com - Save the file and start Firefox.
Firefox 2.x for Windows
- Quit Firefox.
- In Windows Explorer open the following directory C:\ -> Program Files -> Mozilla Firefox -> searchplugins
- Open the file named google.xml in your favorite text editor
- Change the value for the XML attribute named SearchForm as follows:
Default: http://www.google.com/firefox
Changed: http://www.google.com
Voila! Now you have what many of my friends would have logically concluded as the expected action for the Google search plugin for Firefox.
Note that this mod will have to be changed for each successive update of the Firefox application, so it may not be to your taste.
Those of you out there who are running an installation of SCT Luminis 3 may have noticed that the browser check always comes up warning you that the browser is unsupported when using Firefox 2, even though all the features seem to be completely supported.
This is due to the fact that the browsercheck javascript does not know about the new agent string that was introduced with Firefox 2. Generally a new release, or service pack to Luminis fixes this for newer browsers.
In order to change this you will need to alter a couple of files in you Luminis install.
The two files that need to be altered are:
- webapps/luminis/js/clientsniffer.js
- /webapps/luminis/WEB-INF/templates/portal/browserchk.thtml
clientsniffer.js
In this file you will need to alter the conditional of the big if-statement that follows the assignment for the variable is_nav5.
The problem is that the if checks for the existence of a revision number of 1.8. What you need to do is add an additional check for a revision number of 1.8.1.6. So the if-statement conditional becomes:
if (is_nav5 || agt.indexOf(”rv:1.7.12″) != -1 || agt.indexOf(”rv:1.8″) != -1 || agt.indexOf(”rv:1.8.1.6″) != -1)
The next thing to do is to add an additional Firefox variable that is set to true if the major number is 2. I added this after the existing variable is_fox1_5.
var is_fox2 = (is_fox && (is_major == 2));
browserchk.thtml
In the browsercheck file you need to alter if-statement that sets the variable supported to have a true value. This if-statement should follow immediately after the one that checks for whether java is enabled in your browser.
What you need to add is an additional OR check, so that the if-statement conditional looks like the following:
if ((is_nav8) || (is_nav7) || (is_moz1_7) || (is_win && is_ie5up) || (is_win && is_ie6) || (is_saf1_3) || (is_fox1_5) || (is_fox2) || (is_win && is_fox1))
I have tested this change with Firefox 2.0.0.6 on the following browsers:
- Mac OS X 10.4.10
- Windows XP SP2
- Windows Vista
- Ubuntu 6.10
Resources
Well, over the weekend some of the other sysadmins of the world provided the solution to the Office 2007 file download problems.
It’s all about the mime types. For those of you not in the know, a MIME type is an Internet Standard that is used to help webservers and e-mail servers know what kind of files are being served up and sent out. Check out the Wikipedia article for more.
So on an Apache webserver you need to add the following to your mime types file:
application/vnd.openxmlformats docx pptx xlsx
Thanks goes out to Vlad Mazek and his post on this one.
Now if only it was so easy for a Windows webserver running IIS. For the process on updating IIS, surf on over to the entry on David Oberton’s blog at a href=”http://uksbsguy.com/”>UK SBS Guy.
So with the impending roll out of Microsoft Office 2007 here at work, we have discovered something interesting. Apparently IE 6 and IE 7 don’t understand how to deal with the new file types that were introduced with Office 2007.
For those of you who aren’t aware, with the introduction of Office 2007, Microsoft has moved to new new file format for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint called Open XML. The new extensions for the files have an x added to the end of the familiar Office file extensions. For more on the file types check out the Wikipedia entry Microsoft Office 2007 file extensions.
The behavior when attempting to download the files using IE is that the browser treats them as zip files and displays the familiar “Run, Save, Cancel” box after starting the download. The fun part is that Firefox 2.0.0.3 and Netscape 8.1.3 both check the file extension against the file types list of the OS and if the new file types are listed appropriately, they tell you the correct type of Office document that you are attempting to download. (Note: you only get the new file type definitions if you have installed Office 2007 or the Office 2007 File Compatibility Pack for Office 2003).
Good game, Microsoft. I really hope that you produce a fix soon.
For those searching for more information on this, here’s a couple of links I found on the problem:
http://www.tutorials-xe.com/ERRORS/docx-becomes/
http://www2.nau.edu/~d-elearn/faculty_support/tutorials/office2007/office2007.php