Yet Another Linux Blog

I thought this would be a totally great idea: make a copy of Wikipedia, put it on an external USB2 HD, label/package it nicely and sell it to people. It would be quite useful for people who have slow connections, like developing countries, maybe. And the disk would be reusable when the content became outdated.

Costs: HD, external enclosure, label/packaging, shipping.

Here’s some relevant links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Download
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_releases
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_on_CD/DVD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Snapshots
http://static.wikipedia.org/

It seems it is not trivial to just make a dump of the Wikipedia. There is now a function which can export the whole thing as HTML pages, but no documentation yet on how to use it. Alternatively, one could use the database dump, and import it into a local SQL database and run MediaWiki locally on top of the database. The former is certainly easier.

Tom Adelstein at lxer writes down a feasible business idea.

It is now almost as easy to share a directory in Ubuntu Breezy as in Windows. This is assuming you’re using GNOME.

Simply install nautilus-share and you’ll be able to right-click on a folder and select Share just like in Windows.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen complaints about “Firefox memory problems”. I’ve even seen posts that talk about how many hits you get in Google for something like “Firefox memory leak” and how that must mean there’s a real problem.

Here’s a typical complaint:

firefox’s memory usage has always been a thorn in my side. I tend to average around 20 to 25 tabs open, usually while I’m running other ram hungry applications. Firefox generally was eating up about 200-250 megs of ram on my machine

Listen, genius, just how much RAM do you want it to be using when you’ve got an average of 25 tabs open? Have you even tried having 25 tabs open with a different browser? Do they use much less memory with the same 25 pages open with the same page histories?

I just want to say that I’ve never had any problems with Firefox, and it’s my favorite browser. If you really think it’s using too much memory, spend $25 and add a 256MB stick to your machine.