Sunday, June 26, 2011

Microsoft tax

My original Acer Aspire One sadly died recently, so I decided to replace it with an Aspire One 753. I'm anticipating it's arrival. One of the reasons I bought the Aspire One originally was that it came with Linux installed. Unfortunately this is no longer an option (the Cromia isn't available here yet), so I began to investigate if it's possible to get a refund for Windows 7. The posts below show that it is -

Getting a Windows refund from Acer in the Netherlands
Windows tax refund for Acer notebook (Acer Aspire 1410/1810T)

but I don't have the patience to go through the difficult process. Whilst I'm not a Microsoft hater in general, their monopolistic practices have clearly left a legacy -  and sadly this time they will be taking a cut from me.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Chrome unresponsive for gmail and yahoo mail on Fedora 14

Some time back I switched from Firefox to Chrome on my Aspire One (running Fedora 14). I was impressed by how fast it is, and became a convert. Unfortunately, after some time it became unusable, with gmail and many other pages leaving Chrome unresponsive.

I tried many workarounds and 'solutions', removing my cache and configuration directories but still no joy.

I then began troubleshooting with strace - and noticed that the problem went away. This lead me to some more googling, and I found this post -

Issue 77274: Chrome 11 hangs on linux due to gecko-mediaplayer

The solution was as simple as removing gecko-mediaplayer


$ sudo yum erase gecko-mediaplayer