64-bit Firefox and 64-bit Flash plugin

Adobe has temporarily closed the Labs program of Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux to revamp it's architecture and release it with more native support. They have also removed the downloads link for older release of 64 bit packages. However, if you wish to have flash-plugin without installing 32 bit libraries, follow these simple steps:

1. Download 64 bit  plugin from this direct link (I'm not sure how long this URL will be available).
2. Uncompress the downloaded file and copy(as root user) the shared object(libflashplayer.so) to /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/.

Restart Mozilla Firefox and visit about:plugins to verify the plugin. The above steps have been tested in Firefox-3.6.4 running on Fedora 13.

Reference:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AMD64/FirefoxAndPlugins


Caveat: Adobe flash-plugin is not FOSS.

Pino and Gwibber

Following the suggestion by one of the readers(Jeugo) of my earlier post, I did a quick comparison between Pino and Gwibber.

Gwibber supports a wide variety of social networking services, but Pino currently supports only identi.ca and twitter. But this doesn't sound appealing to me as I need only a twitter client.

The UI of Gwibber seems to be cluttered when compared with that of Pino. The huge font size was also annoying which reduced the number of messages shown at a time.

Pino has a tray icon through which I can easily access the application. When using Gwibber, I have to keep the window open or minimised to view the updates.

P.S: May be I will switch to Gwibber, when I start using a service which is not supported by Pino. But for now Pino is the better option.

Pino - GNOME client for Twitter

I was in search for a decent desktop application(in GNOME) for twitter and finally the search ends at http://pino-app.appspot.com. I haven't tried too much apps for twitter, but was not really happy with the firefox extensions available.

Pino is a  simple, fast and easy to use twitter/identi.ca client with a nice user interface. It fits into the panel as a tray icon and notifies via the notification system whenever a new tweet pops up. Setting up an account is easy and you can also use the URL shortening(goo.gl, is.gd) service from Pino. 

The source package is available for download from the above link and also available as RPM package for Fedora. If you are using Fedora 12, then just run the command "yum install pino". Pino is available as a default application in the upcoming Fedora 13 release. Check the announcement here : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2010-April/002787.html

Visit the project website for more details and screenshots.  Feel free to use and contribute to pino.