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Firefox 3 default page zoom missing …

On my eee PC I really need a browser, which allows zooming the whole page. While using opera a lot I also like Firefox 3 a lot as it runs rather fast and consumes less memory than Firefox 2. However there is one thing, which is really annoying: Firefox 3 does not allow users to set a default zoom level to start with, which is a rather hand feature for my eee PC 701 .

Fortunately a clever developer found the problem and prepared an add-on, which allows default zoom levels and much more: No Squint … thanks go to Jason Tackaberry.

Links:

• No Squint – original home page
• No Squint – at mozilla.org

Asus EEE PC: Enable full screen

First thing with the eee pc was to find out how to enable full screen in IceWM. Full screen in the window manager results in maximized windows without decorations. Therefore one has a lot more space for the actual program (e.g. xterm or Thunderbird).

First of all you need to copy the icewm preferences to your home dir (open terminal with CTRL-ALT-t):

/home/user> mkdir ~/.icewm
/home/user> cp /etc/X11/icewm/preferences /home/user/.icewm

Then you need to edit those preferences, e.g. with kwrite.

/home/user> kwrite /home/user/.icewm/preferences

Search for ”AllowFullscreen” and remove the “#” at the beginning of the line. Check if it is set to “1″.

After restarting your IceWM (e.g. with CTRL-AL-BACKSPACE) you can make use of the fullscreen mode in all applications by hitting ALT-F11.

My new EEE PC

With some luck I grabbed an Asus EEE PC – a white one, the last in stock – at the Saturn market on Wednesday. As I always wanted to own a subnotebook my expectations were quite high, but I have to say: I’m impressed! The EEE comes with a whole lot of software (OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Kontact, Konqueror, … even Java JRE 1.5) and can be customized without end. I installed several games, the VLC media player and the Opera browser, which works really fine with the page zoom feature.

On the photo you can see the EEE along with my PSP. This shows how small this thing is. Also the weight is impressive, but best of all: It can decode MPEG-2 (DVB transport streams) and H.264 without dropping a lot of frames. That’s really cool as the CPU runs only at ~ 600 MHz.

While my colleagues are already queuing to do some multimedia tests I’m looking forward to testing the Java capabilities of this device. Full 1.5 mobile java runtime … sounds great to me