EDIT: it seems i was tripping - this doesn't really have anything to do with aalib - please keep that in mind...


hi guys... i've been trying to clean-up my install, getting rid of packages i don't need, and i'm having some doubts about aalib-1.4rc5-i386-1...

when i remove this package, my firefox browser is slightly affected: the image placeholders of downloading images on web pages change to this weird placeholder with a red dot at the top...

aalib is an ASCII art thing so i'm not exactly sure what the relation with firefox's image download/render process is...

besides, aalib-1.4rc5 is like 5 years old and i'd like to stay clear of this kinda unmaintained software if possible...

any input you might have would be great...

thanks in advance...

You can use ldd to check things out. It may be a little tricky with firefox, since /usr/bin/firefox is a shell script.

For firefox:
For me, this gets /usr/lib/firefox-1.0.6/firefox-bin (may vary for you).

In my case:
This should tell you if any needed libraries are missing.

Try this before removing aalib-1.4rc5-i386-1, then try again after. Is there any difference?

aalib is extremely small library, so there is no need to remove it. Xine uses it for some rendering (aaxine), so this might (I don't know if it is loaded staticaly or not) get affected, too. Better leave it as it is.

thanks for the replies guys... i checked with "ldd" both before and after and everything was fine... the weird thing is that the red dot placeholders are gone now... in other words, it's not doing it anymore... weird... i guess it must have been something else then... if i figure-out which package it was, i'll post it to provide this thread with some sort of closure...

for now, i've removed aalib and everything is fine... i recompiled gimp as i know it had a plugin for that and i guess i'll have to recompile xine to make sure it doesn't think i have aalib, etc, etc... it's all good... once again, thanks for your help!!!

i think i might have narrowed it down to the "load images from the originating website only" option in firefox... when i enable this option, i get the red dot placeholders for images while/before they load... it seems to be the same placeholder that is used for images that weren't loaded because they are hosted at another website... can anyone confirm this??

if i disable the from the originating website only option then the regular placeholder is used instead while images load...

i'm still not sure if this red dot thing is a bug or a feature... i mean, it seems like it's a feature to let you know when images have not been loaded due to the restriction, but i'm not sure why the red dot placeholder would replace the regular one while images that are indeed from the originating website load...


EDIT/PS: a workaround to get rid of the red dot placeholder if it freaks you out as much as it freaks me out is to toggle the browser.display.show_image_placeholders option in about:config to false...

This setting doesn't even work for me in Linux. So I've tried it in Windows and everything was working properly (no red placeholders).

so you've never gotten the red dot placeholders?? sorry, i'm not sure i fully understand what you're saying... which setting doesn't work for you on linux??

Load images from the originating website only setting.
Every stupid banner is being loaded while browsing different websites in Linux.
I get regular placeholders (same placeholders which are used for normal images) in Windows.
Don't know why it doesn't work in Linux.

Thread title changed as per request