Steffen's Tech Blog

XULRunner is an interesting runtime environment developed by the Mozilla Foundation for providing a common back-end for XUL applications as rich as Mozilla Firefox or Songbird . There is a nice getting started tutorial available. It starts with explaining how to download and install XULRunner. If you are using Ubuntu open the Synaptic Package Manager (Top panel: System --> Administration --> Synaptic Package Manager) and search for xulrunner and install the most current version. If you can't find the xulrunner package, make sure that you have checked "Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)" from Ubuntu "Software Sources". Follow step 3 to 8. You should now see a window that looks something like this screenshot taken from Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10.

Ever considered to make your Ubuntu installation even more secure? There is an excellent chapter available in the official Ubuntu documentation called "Keeping Your Computer Safe" that is worth to read. I used its sub chapter "Set up a firewall" to install the firestarter package - an Open Source visual firewall program that combines ease of use with powerful firewall features. To understand its basic features and how to use them you can read the quick tutorial from the Firestarter Online Manual . After completing the start wizard, some services that you might have on your machine such as a web server or a SSH server will not be reachable any longer from the outside because the default configuration set up provides strong protection against incoming intrusions. E.g. the connection from my Macbook via SSH to my Ubuntu machine wasn't possible any longer and therefore my rsync script described in my previous post " Synchronize files between a Macbook and an...