Guide to customizing Ubuntu

Bill Goldberg, an Ubuntu user in Belgium, has written a Guide to customizing Ubuntu’s look and feel that really takes the time to explain how to do what experienced users call “simple tweaks” that in fact may not be so simple at all. Congrats to Bill for making it easy enough for new Ubuntu users to understand. He even shows how to add widgets and a dock, as well as some videos to help show what some of the things are. Some of his instructions are links to other sites, but he’s smart enough to not try to redo something that’s already done quite well.

[UPDATED] Congratulations, MozillaZine. You’ve killed your forums.

[Updated to include an explanation from MozillaZine why you may not be able to use the new forums yet. - Peng]

For some time now MozillaZine (which is not owned by Mozilla, makers of Firefox and Thunderbird, as well as other cool open source software) has been promising an upgrade to their forums. A few months ago they opened a testing version of the new forum software and invited users to check it out. Unfortunately over the weekend they decided to close the old forums and open the upgraded version to the public. Now when you get to the MozillaZine Forums you see a nice note saying the old forums are closed and we should visit their new forums. I tried to grab the text on the old Forum home page but it jumps to the new page so quickly that I couldn’t even do a quick select and copy. The weird thing is that I tried to disable META redirection and it still jumps so fast (after a single second) that I couldn’t copy it fast enough, which is weird because one thing the Web Developer extension is supposed to do is let me disable META redirections like this. Luckily I was able to save the page from a link and get it so I could examine the code. The announcement says

The mozillaZine Forums have been upgraded!  You can join us at our new forums site for now!

There’s a link under the bold text to bring us to forums-test.mozillazine.org. There’s just one problem. There doesn’t seem to be a site at that URI.

Address Not Found

Firefox can’t find the server at forums-test.mozillazine.org.

Woops! MozillaZine Forums is the best place to get user-to-user support for Firefox and Thunderbird, and with Firefox 3 due out tomorrow they’ve borked the best place for people to get help with the program. Hopefully they’ll get it fixed today, but I’m thinking I may want to remove the link to the forums from my signature on the Ubuntu Forums. Either way, it’s saved me from having to spend the hour plus every day catching up with what’s going on in the forums.

If I find out anything about what happened and when the forums are expected back I’ll post it so you can see it.

Updated 3:03 pm: MozillaZine must have been made aware of the issue, because when I visited the forums a few minutes ago I got this:

The mozillaZine Forums have been upgraded! If you are still seeing this message, your ISP/Internet provider has not updated their DNS to point you to our new forus IP address. You can try using forums-test.mozillazine.org to access the newly upgraded forums while your DNS updates, please note that your cookies will not work until your DNS has been updated to use the old forums.mozillazine.org name!

I’m guessing Comcast hasn’t updated their DNS listings yet, because I can’t get to the new forums yet. It’s unfortunate that their link doesn’t include a numeric IP address to reach the new forums, because I still can’t get to them, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn I’m not alone.