Netpurgatory

My desktop at school (thales) died on Tuesday. So my website and pretty much everything has been inaccesible for about a week. I finally found some disk space to put my backups of the webpage and my cvsroot directory so I can at least get some work done.

This makes me very happy that I have backups that run automatically as a cron job every night. If you don’t make regular backup, let this be a reminder that you really really should.

I do have lots of data that I’m not able to backup due to disk space and network limitations. So I really hope the processor died and not the disk. I’m hopefully since the last time a processor on thales failed it behaved the same way. Of course since one processor already failed a year or so ago if a processor failed, that would bring my formally dual processor desktop down to a zero processor machine which will not do me much good. But it would be better than losing a two or three hundred gigs of data.

I’ve been a fan of Firefox and Mozilla for a long time now. I’ve used some kind of Mozilla pretty much exclusively since before the whole Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox thing. I’ve been encouraging people to use Firefox or Mozilla for almost as long. And I keep an up-to-date version of Firefox installed for other people to use on our dept. Mandrake machines.

But now I’m kind of annoyed. I updated Firefox to version 2 on my Gentoo desktop.

emerge -v mozilla-firefox

Previously any time I’ve done this, once the emerge is done, I just close Firefox, open it up again and it’s all good. But not this time. The icon for Firefox is gone, and it gave me some trouble about filenames. After logging out and then back in, I can open it, but no more Firefox. Now the browser is called Bon Echo. Apparently Gentoo had to deal with the same trademark crap that Debian had to deal with (resulting in their calling the browser IceWeasel).

Not to hard to fix. Just add the line:

www-client/mozilla-firefox mozbranding

to /etc/portage/package.use

But this is really stupid. And it makes it much harder for me to keep recommending Firefox to people. I understand that trademarks need to be defended, but there is no reason that they have to take this kind of stand against GNU/Linux distributions. They claim to want to protect their brand, but how does it help to have at least 3 different names for the same browser. Sounds more like they are diluting the brand. I just cannot imagine why a browser that got to where it is largely because of word of mouth would go and intentionally annoy the very people who helped get them where they are in the first place.

If I actually used KDE I would try Konqueror instead.