Linux Skype "send file via drag & drop"-problem

Hello everyone!

Skype on Linux isn't as bad as many think it is...I guess. At least for me the most important features work as good as so I would never come to the idea that I needed to boot windows in order to have a convenient conversation.

There are some minor "flaws" though - e.g features in the UI microsoft didn't (want to?) make work on linux. One of those is the fact that you cannot simply drag a file from nautilus/konqueror/thunar (I only confirmed thunar, so correct me if this is an xfce-only problem) and drop it onto the skype window to send it. Thus, you will probably need to click on the (+), then "send file" and the navigate to the file (again). If you are used to have the system file manager open in the file-to-send's folder next to your skype window, this is not really a nice workflow to be honest, compared to what is possible in the windows version.

I spend quite some time researching on this, so I guess that I have to tell that this lack isn't "fixable" as of now unfortunately (although I would be glad to have someone correct me here, too).
BUT I just found out another way to simplify the process by accident:

Skype seems to accept files to send from the clipboard!

Thus, ctrl-c with the desired file selected in your file manager and then ctrl+v inside skype will have the same effect as dragging and dropping on windows and is almost as convenient.

I hope this text will be findable in google so others may see this alternate solution, too. If you like this "workaround" or have a better solution, leave a comment.

Until then: Good bye!

Yours suluke

Xfce dark theme firefox font color issue

Good evening everybody!

For quite a while now I'm using xfce with a nicely looking dark/black theme ("dark orange bird" to be precise) and it's just so much better for my eyes this way.
There has only been one problem coming along with it, namely appearing in firefox, which was that FF seemingly adopted the white font color from the system when rendering fonts in input fields (e.g. in the main search field on the google webpages).

Unfortunately, "Preferences" -> "Content" -> "Colors" -> disable "Use system colors" did not resolve the problem, so I had to google a bit further and finally found Stefan Hellmann's guide HERE

The Problem described there was bit different from mine, since I wanted everything to stay "normal" with a white google page and black letters on white ground, so the userContent.css I ended up with looked a bit different:

input { 
   -moz-appearance: none !important;
   color: black;
}

textarea {
   -moz-appearance: none !important;
   color: black;
}

I also had to create the "chrome" folder. And don't be confused - what was FOO:BAR in Stefan Hellmann's blog post can greatly differ from that. Usually it ends with :DEFAULT and (at least for me) starts with some seemingly random letters.

I hope this may help someone out there.
See you soon

suluke

[Fedora 18 x64] Enable Adobe flash player in Steam for Linux

Hey folks!

The last two days I played around a little with the (relatively) new steam for linux.
One thing I noticed was, that game preview videos did not play with the notice that flash player wasn't installed.
So I searched the web and finally found THIS guide, which basically just

1. downloads the 32bit flash player from HERE, 
2. extracts the libflashplayer.so from it and 
3. places it in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. You will need super user rights to do this.

This worked fine for me, although you have to make sure the lib is marked executable (and readable, of course). If you can't remember the command, here you go:

sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

Afterwards, restart steam if it has been running and enjoy!