AliPay is the Paypal of China and hard to ignore if you want to use websites like TaoBao (the Chinese eBay.) Unlike Paypal however, it requires ActiveX components or Firefox plugins to function. Getting this to work on Linux can be a pain if you don’t read Chinese. So here’s in English:

Download http://blog.alipay.com/wp-content/2008/10/aliedit.tar.gz

Extract it into /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (as root) or into ~/.mozilla/plugins (if you care about the current user only.) Restart Firefox and things should work! (Select Tools, Add-ons, Plugins to verify that Aliedit has been installed.)

Plugins directory may vary on other distributions.

While eagerly installing Offline Gmail on my computers I ran into the fact the Google Gears is actually not available for 64-bit Linux. I managed to find a number of builds out there, but none that would actually work for me with Offline Gmail or the new WordPress.

Building it myself wasn’t as straight forward as I hoped, so let me safe you the hassle and allow me to share the result with you:

gears-linux-opt-05110.xpi

This build was tested with Firefox 3.0.5 on (k)Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid. Enjoy!

EDIT: Firefox reports the download to be 4G, but it will complete successfully after 2.7M.

Updated binary:

gears-linux-opt-05180.xpi

This build was tested with Firefox 3.0.9 on (k)Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. (It will install but NOT work on Firefox 3.5.)

Updated binary:

gears-linux-opt-05210.xpi

Did not change anything for Firefox 3.5 this time, since it doesn’t work anyway.