How to reduce Firefox memory usage

If you use Fedora Core 5 you can disable Pango support within Firefox, this should reduce a lot the browser memory usage.

To disable it simply put inside your .bash_profile this export string:
export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
Then logoff and login again.

Pango is used only for some particular languages (ie. indian) so if you don’t need to read site with those you’ll not note anything.

Gnome Slab for Fedora Core 5

guarda slab on fedora 5 on flickr

Tonight I’ve forged one on my first RPM package for Fedora Core 5, this package is SLAB the new Gnome menu created from Novell for the upcoming Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop.

Actually SLAB isn’t very platform indipendend because it need some enhancement done by Novell to Gnome, ie. the latest used applications doesn’t work at all.

Moreover in the code there are some call to SuSe application (such YaST and Zen-Updater), I’ve hacked a little the schemas to use only Gnome, or at least Fedora, similar applications (ie. gnome-newtork-schema, gnome-yelp, Fedora pup and pirut).

I’ll upload the RPM as soon as possible on my official italian blog, so feel free to test it but remember that:

• this is my first real RPM, I’ve not (yet) studied nothing about dependancies, lib or whatever
• this is a package of a UNSTABLE software wrote for ANOTHER distro
• Beagle should be enabled
• To add the new main-menu applet to your panel after the installation you need to restart Gnome, a simple logoff should be fine.

If you use Ubuntu take a look here and here.

update

Here you can download the RPM archive: slab-0.6.2-8.i386.rpm. Here you can download the hacked sources slab-0.6.2.tgz

ciuaz