The Case of the Dormant Function Keys

There's an intermittent problem on my home PC (Linux Mint) that's been driving me slightly buggy (okay, slightly buggier).  My mail client is Thunderbird, and when composing messages I frequently hit the F9 key, which should open the "Contacts Sidebar", from which I can select recipients.  Usually it does.  On my office PC and laptop it always does.  At home, though, it sometimes doesn't -- the F9 key goes mysteriously dead in T-bird.  I can work around it by opening the contacts sidebar from a menu, and eventually the problem disappears (for a while).

Today, though, it happened again and I decided to try to sort it out.  Testing with other programs showed that all the function keys, not just F9, were dead, and in all applications.  I checked system settings in the control panel, and could find nothing that would be remapping the F keys.  A bit of work with Google, though, turned up the culprit: my keyboard.

I have a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard at home (and only on the home PC). Microsoft decided to assign alternate functions to all the F keys, so that, for example, F9 does double duty as the "Send" key (with a different key code).  At the end of the row of function keys is an "F Lock" key.  (For reasons that will become clear, I cannot get out of my head another name for it, also starting with "F" and ending with "ck".)  The F Lock key toggles function keys between their normal key codes and the alternate codes.  It apparently cannot be controlled by the operating system -- or at least nobody has figured out how.  Microsoft being Microsoft, they decided that the F Lock key has to be on for function keys to act as function keys (which seems to suggest that the being a function key is not the normal role of the function key).  Whatever.

The problem, as reported by various people, is that the F Lock apparently toggles randomly, without the key being struck.  In my case, this may mean that the state of the function keys at startup is random -- the keyboard sometimes wakes with F Lock on and sometimes with F Lock off.  With the culprit identified, there are two possible resolutions.  For now, I'll try the lazy approach: do nothing special, but keep an eye on the F Lock status light.  If it becomes too hard for me to remember this (the problem is, after all, intermittent), the more involved solution is to use the xev utility (which displays keyboard events, including key codes) to make a list of the key codes of the 12 function keys, both with and without F Lock engaged, and then use the xmodmap utility to map the key codes for the non-standard functions (undo, redo, reply, send, ...) back to the same virtual keys as the function keys (so that F9 looks like F9 to the system, regardless of the status of F Lock).

Expanding Recipient Lists in Thunderbird

Sometimes dealing off the bottom of the deck saves a lot of time.

I really like Thunderbird (the Mozilla mail/news/RSS program), but like any software it has its imperfections, one of which particularly bugs me. I get a lot of mail (jokes, slide shows, movies) that I want to circulate to the same list of people. That much is easy: I just created a mailing list in one of my Tbird address books, containing all the names and addresses. The problem is that the inbound message usually comes from someone on the list, and I don't want to send it back to them. So the plan is to blind carbon the list, delete the person who sent it to me, and ship it ... except that Tbird does not expand the list in the Bcc: (or To: or Cc:) field.

Searching on line, I discovered that I'm far from the only person bothered by this omission. I used to fudge it by creating a pseudo-individual (rather than a mailing list) whose e-mail "address" was actually a list of all the addresses. Tbird would duly fill in this long list in one Bcc: line, and then hitting enter or tab in that line would split it into individual lines that could be selectively edited. That stopped working reliably a version or so ago (the wages of exploiting an undocumented "feature"), so it was back to Google, where I found the answer: a nifty extension called AddExpandedList. Select the list in the contacts panel, right click it, and you have options to add the list in expanded form to any one of To:/Cc:/Bcc:.

I found it a few days ago and added it to all three of my Thunderbird 3.0 installations. So of course Mozilla came out with the upgrade to TB 3.1 today, and it blocked AddExpandedList on the grounds that it was allegedly incompatible with TB 3.1. Sigh.

That led me to start looking for information, tutorials etc. on how to write a TB extension. Skipping an hour or so of travail (out of date information, stuff that made my eyes water, ...), I found the Mozilla Add-on Builder, a wizard that asks you a few questions and then hands you the skeleton of an extension. That doesn't get you very far, since you still have to do the coding yourself. In looking at what the builder gave me, though, I noticed that the install.rdf file (which essentially tells TB what it's about to install) contains a field maxVersion that gives the highest TB version number with which the extension is compatible. (If this were a cartoon, a lightbulb would pop up over my head at this point.) So I opened the installation package for AddExpandedList in a zip utility, opened its version of install.rdf in a text editor, and sure 'nuff it had maxVersion=3.0*. I changed that to 3.1 and TB happily re-installed the extension (which works just dandy with TB 3.1). Saved me who knows how many hours of trying to learn how to write my own extension!

(Update: Not too long after I posted this, a new version of AddExpandedList came out that works with TB 3.1.)

Updating Firefox/Thunderbird (Ubuntu & Mint)

I really like both Firefox and Thunderbird, and I like using the latest stable versions (plus it makes sense from a security standpoint). Unfortunately, the official Ubuntu software repositories lag behind, so if you stick to them you don't get the latest versions. In my case, that's an extra headache because I also use Firefox and Thunderbird on Windows XP, and I'd like to have the same user interface on all machines. Fortunately, there's a simple solution: the Ubuntuzilla project.

The first step is to add Ubuntuzilla to the list of repositories used by the Synaptic package manager. The Ubuntuzilla wiki gives good instructions, although they seem to omit what I would consider the most intuitive approach for GUI-oriented users: start the package manager (giving an administrator password); click Settings | Repositories; go to the Other Software tab; click Add... and paste in the command shown on the wiki page ("deb ... main"). Then click the Reload button. (Ignore any complaint about not finding the public key for the new repository.) You can now install the firefox-mozilla-build and thunderbird-mozilla-build packages to update them to the latest versions, and also do future updates through Synaptic the same as with other packages.

Before updating them, though, it's recommended that you back up your existing configuration information, mailboxes etc. They'll most likely be saved in folders named .mozilla and .mozilla-thunderbird under your home folder. If you're using the default Nautilus file manager, you can see hidden folders (those starting with ".") by hitting ctrl-h. Just copy those two folders anywhere safe (I use the desktop) before upgrading.

Today's update took Firefox from 3.5 to 3.6.2 and Thunderbird from 2.0.something to 3.0.3. Firefox found and used the old settings with no effort, but Thunderbird did not. (The same upgrade on Windows did automatically convert all the old settings, archives etc.) The problem with Thunderbird is that version 2 stored its stuff in .mozilla-thunderbird but version 3 stores it in .thunderbird. So the fix is trivial. The first step is to create a .thunderbird folder under the home folder. If you've already started Thunderbird and bailed out when it asked you to create new accounts, just find the .thunderbird folder and delete its contents (but leave the folder itself). Then all that remains is to copy the contents of .mozilla-thunderbird into .thunderbird, and Tbird 3 aborbs it all when next it is started. I'll hang onto the .mozilla-thunderbird folder a bit just to be on the safe side, but I should be able to delete it safely.

[UPDATE 5 March 2011: The latest updates to Firefox and Thunderbird have made their way into the Canonical repositories but not into Ubuntuzilla, as best I can tell.  Message traffic on the Ubuntuzilla forum (from outsiders, not from project managers) suggests that Ubuntuzilla may have become inactive.  So I've switched back to the "official" ports for Ubuntu.  The process was easy -- just uninstall the old, install the new in Synaptic.  I backed up my profile folders (~/.mozilla and ~/.thunderbird), but the backups were not needed in the end.  Rumor has it Canonical has adopted a policy of sanctioning updates, at least for the Mozilla programs, more quickly.  So thanks to the Ubuntuzilla folks for the service they provided while it was needed.]