Faster than a hunted fox, more powerful than a raging fire

I had to build a new linux box on the weekend as I was worried that the random crashes of my beloved SGI workstation were caused by something sinister like dying ram or disks.

Luckily I had a spare motherboard lying around (thank's Julian), unfortunately I only had a celeron processor. I also had to do some nifty soldering work to attach the right pentium power connector to the power supply ;)

I took the opportunity to install Fedora Core 3 - my first ever post-redhat installation. And I must say I am very impressed.

But of course I had to create a whole new set of settings. Thankfully I keep my emacs configuration in CVS, so that's most of my environment set up! I was lucky that the day after I installed, Firefox 1.0.4 hit the main Fedora repositary and was updated by up2date. I wanted to share with you some absolute essentials to a lovely firefox experience.

First is speed. I used to be disappointed that IE was always faster than Firefox, but not with the sweet performance tweaks I researched (see the recent links tab to your left). For your reference, I settled on the following changes in about:config ...

firefox
network.dns.disableIPv6: true
network.http.pipelining: true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: 8

I also can no longer live without Pimpzilla ;)

I was soon frustrated by the lack of standard unix keyboard shortcuts (ie. emacs/bash keys). I mean, MacOS X has them ... if one of the world's leaders in UI thinks they are ok, then why on earth would a primarily unix distribution disable them! They are the one consistent set of keys I can use on every platform (except windows). Fortunately you can still revert gnome/gtk applications to real unix behaviour. Run gconf-editor and navigate to the desktop/gnome/interface key (if gconf-editor makes you feel dirty, you've spent too long in regedt32 ;) and set it to "Emacs" (no quotes). The change is immediate - not even any need to restart applications which is quite amazing.