Andy @ Hillhome.org » VMware

Fixing the Home & End Keys in Zimbra Desktop for Mac

Andy — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:20:27 +0000

When I first switched from Windows to Mac several years ago, there was one huge annoyance I had to overcome. By default, the Home and End keys behave very differently than they do in Windows. In Windows, they move the cursor to the beginning and end of a line, respectively. On the Mac, they move you to the top or bottom of a screen/document.

There are a couple of fixes out there that work great for OS X in general, and Firefox specifically. I’ve been using both of these for several years with great success.

Well, over the weekend my work e-mail was migrated from Exchange to Zimbra, and this issue resurfaced when I started using Zimbra Desktop 7. After a bit of digging, I figured out that ZD is based on Mozilla Prism, which is a bundled version of Firefox for offline-capable applications like Zimbra Desktop. Unfortunately, ZD does not really support the use of Extensions, even though there is one included and enabled by default.

To make a long story short, I was able to take the Keyfixer Firefox extension mentioned above and customize it to work with Zimbra Desktop. Thanks to Matt Ball for the original extension. I’ve renamed it to avoid confusion, but his name remains in the files.

The extension is available here (updated 8/11/2011 for Zimbra Desktop 7.1.1).

This has been tested with Zimbra Desktop 7.0.1 and 7.1.1 on Mac OS 10.6.7.

Installation instructions

Unzip the downloaded file, which will yield a folder called “zimbrahomeendfix@hillhome.org”
Exit Zimbra Desktop
Copy the folder above to ~/Library/Zimbra Desktop/profile/extensions
Start Zimbra Desktop and test the keys by composing a new e-mail
If needed, you can verify the extension is loaded by pressing Shift-F6, clicking the gear in the lower right of the screen, followed by Tools, Add-ons.

I hope this helps others. Let me know if you encounter any issues!

Goodbye Novell, Hello VMware

Andy — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:50:41 +0000

I’ve been severely neglecting this site the past several months with everything going on. Moving is about my least favorite thing on earth, and as if that wasn’t enough, I resigned from Novell at the end of December to take a job at fast-growing virtualization giant VMware. Leaving Novell was something I agonized over for many months, but when the VMware opportunity came along, I just couldn’t turn it down. Novell was a great place to work, and the company was very good to me over 8-plus years. I will miss many of my former colleagues.

My job at VMware is similar – I’m a Senior Systems Engineer, but now focused exclusively on working with Chicago area customers, which is nice. No more airline or hotel status after this year!

It’s been an interesting transition so far – down to the little things like switching from GroupWise to Outlook and Exchange, which I’ve never used in a company before. After 3-4 years of running exclusively a Linux desktop, I’m now having to learn how much Windows sucks all over again. I’m working on that part – I think I’ll either switch back to SLED, or take the Mac plunge.

You’ll probably see my posts focusing more on VMware and virtualization now, and less on Linux, although I’m proud to say I’m still running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 at home. Of course, it’s now virtuallized by VMware ESX Server 3.5. More on that later.

VMware on 2.6.5 kernel (SLES9)

Andy — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 23:12:59 +0000

For personal archival purposes:

NETSYS.COM – SuSE Linux Mailing List Archives (english)

make cloneconfig

make modules

This gets around the symbol error…