Firefox crashing with Adobe PDF plugin

I had struggled for quite a while with the way Mozilla Firefox would crash each time I tried to open a PDF document - I always had to save the link independently and then open the doc. The default behavior of in-browser opening of the document was the problem, it seemed. So here is how you solve it.

From the Firefox menu, go to Tools->Options. There, on the Applications tab, you will find a long list of applications/document types and what is supposed to be used to open each of those. It would look like this:

In there, like I've shown here, find the Adobe Acrobat documents and instead of "Adobe Acrobat (in Firefox)", select "Adobe Acrobat Reader", i.e. the program itself. If that does not show up by default, select "Other", and browse to find Adobe Acrobat Reader.

There you go - no more crashes! :)

Boost your volume on toshiba laptops running ubuntu

If you have a Toshiba Satellite laptop and run ubuntu, then you probably hate the fact that you cannot hear the sound as loud as you would want it to be. Doing a
sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixergui
will not help too much as well, since it will still show only Master and Capture in the alsamixergui under Applications -> Sound and Video -> Alsa Mixer

So here is what you need to do: you need to install alsa from source. First, download the latest ones from here: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Download. The volume control is under Utilities, but you will also need the Library to install that stuff.

So first, install the library:

tar -xvjf alsa-lib-1.0.20.tar.bz2

cd alsa-lib-1.0.20

./configure

make

sudo make install

Then install the utilities:

tar -xvjf alsa-utils-1.0.20.tar.bz2

cd alsa-utils-1.0.20

./configure

sudo make install

NOTE - there is no make step here - direct make install!

If you get an error that says "`t-ja.gmo': No such file or directory" then you need to install gettext.

sudo apt-get install gettext

After that, once your utils are fully installed, go ahead and see the alsa in full glory: open Applications -> Sound and Video -> Alsa Mixer Gui and increase the Master, Head and Front volumes to full! Yennjoy!