Firefox gets a big bite out of your memory doesn’t it? So why not run it remotely?

That’s what I thought when I began my search on how to run firefox remotely. I also thought I was going in search of trouble and scary stuff but guess what, it’s easier than I could ever imagine.

Just do an ssh to the remote machine giving the options -Y and -C. The Y stands for X11 forwarding while the C requests compression of all data (including stdin, stdout, etc..).


ssh -YC


And then on the remote shell issue:


firefox -width 100


And you’re done! How easy was that? The “-width” parameter is necessary to trick the “firefox” shell script wrapper, but it won’t influence the width of the firefox window. Don’t forget to copy your .mozilla directory so you can run firefox with your profile and keep your bookmarks, etc.

For me, with my old 320 RAM laptop from 2001, this is great news :-) And as you might guess this isn’t limited to firefox, you can run any application you’d like.

Be sure to have this options on /etc/ssh/ssh_config:

Host *
ForwardAgent yes
ForwardX11 yes


And these ones on /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

X11Forwarding yes
X11DisplayOffset 10
X11UseLocalhost no
TCPKeepAlive yes
Compression yes


And that’s it. I’m using firefox remotely now to write on this blog and it’s fast and smooth :-)

This month I will hold a contest. A contest with myself. The challenge is to live in Évora, Portugal, for a whole month with 250 Euros (house rent excluded). Since today is Mar 30, this is not my April’s barl joke but rather an excellent day to start this challenge. I will explain the reasons behind this later on.

Update: I will start in April 1, the beginning of the month.

Going up to Linux 2006 today.

Have you seen the The Da Vinci Code movie trailer?

Yesterday I spend the evening playing with Emacs instead of doing my homework (preparing today classes) and that was total irresponsable of me. I’ve been accumulating hours of no-sleep during the week and at night I was kind of like a zombie and unable to understand (or read btw) anything. Today I had to woke earlier (6h) to review the material. Thank god it turned out ok in time but remember:

Rule of thumb here, do real work before slacking!

My girlfriend helped me a lot figuring out what was happening with the NOR’s and XOR’s. It’s so good when you can bounce ideas with someone. Thanks!

Let’s get one thing straight. If you’re still using ISO-* shit to have compatibility with people that aren’t using UTF-8 yet, they will never upgrade.. Just use UTF-8 and so we all can use the most modern character encoding… and get on with our lives.

Like the XChat guys say:

Use Unicode ( UTF-8 ) and tell all your friends to use Unicode. Problem solved!

Using UTF 8 on your web page is as simply as including this tag on the head section:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

And on a general Debian/Debian-based Linux system for using UTF-8 within applications issue:

# dpkg-reconfigure locales

and select UTF 8 if it’s not yet enabled.

Ubuntu users see here.

“Just do it”.