Firefox, AdBlockPlus and Ctrl+Shift+V

I use Ctrl+Shift+V (Paste as Plain Text) extensively overall. However I experienced that in Firefox instead of doing the Paste it opens a sidebar called "Blockable items on current page".

It turned out that this is because of the AdBlockPlus plugin.

To restore the Paste as Plain Text functionality you'll have to

1. open the about:config page in Firefox, 
2. search for the preference name extensions.adblockplus.sidebar_key 
3. change the value of it to something else than Accel Shift V
4. restart Firefox 

After doing these steps, you should have the Paste as Plain Text functionality back.

The solution comes from this source.

Java Applets on Lucid

I found this terrific post, which completely worked for me. Unlike icedtea & co.
It runs my internet bank and it runs facebook photo uploader too!!

It goes like:

The one java app I have to use does not work correctly with openjdk and icedtea, so I really must use sun's runtime and plugin. I was surprised to see that neither this thread nor any of the others I could find said anything about getting sun's plugin to work on lucid (or with firefox-3.6 in general). Maybe my search string wasn't good enough. Anyway, here's how to do it.

First, open 'Software Sources', click the 'Other Software' tab, and enable the lucid partner repo. (If it doesn't show up on the list, add it: deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu lucid partner )

Next, install sun-java6-plugin.

Uninstall both icedtea6-plugin and openjdk-6-jre.

And finally, due to this bug, run the following command in terminal:

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/mozilla-javaplugin.so mozilla-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so 1

This is the only step that is specific to firefox-3.6 and lucid.

Restart firefox and check about:plugins to verify that the correct plugin version is loaded.

If icedtea and openjdk work for the apps you use, then I recommend that you continue to use them rather than switching to the sun versions. However, if you use apps that do not work correct with ubuntu's default java installation, the above should work.