Setup Flock

Latest revision as of 22:40, 11 December 2012

As from April, 2011, Support for Flock was discontinued. The Website is Closed,

and not available anymore. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_%28web_browser%29

and: http://flock.com/

[edit] Pre Install Notes

Flock is a Web Browser which bills itself as a Social Networking Web Browser, which basically makes it Firefox with some very loud bells and whistles.

Alternative to this Howto is available at the site [1] which explains how to install the software using emerge.

I'm also doing this from the KDE interface, using Sabayon Linux 3.4f and installing Flock 0.9.1.2, however most of it will work on Gnome.. as long as you know how to add a desktop icon.

During the HowTo commands use a ~ in the path,, this should denote your home folder,if you are logged i as root (su) this will take you to the home folder of the root user, and not your user..

[edit] Downloading Flock

Flock may be downloaded from The Flock Webpage [2] Click on the Get Flock now link this will download Flock to your default download location as a tar.gz file

For the rest of the Howto we will assume your default download location is at ~/download

[edit] Installing Flock

Installation, is easy, there are probably easier ways to do it than this, i do know this way works..

Open up konsole

cd ~/download tar -xzvf flock*.tar.gz

su

mv flock /opt/flock

exit (take you back to normal user)

[edit] Setup a Toolbar Icon

On the KDE Toolbar,

Right Click and choose Add Application to Panel, then Add Non KDE Application

In the dialog box which appears enter the following in the correct fields

Button Title = Flock Decription = Social Browser Executable = /opt/flock/flock

Click on the Icon, and browse to /opt/flock/icons and choose an icon from here.

Click on OK, and Launch the browser

[edit] Migration Wizard

If you have been using Firefox previous to this, then on the first load, Flock will launch a wizard which will attempt to import your settings. How you progress with this is up to you.

[edit] Getting the Media Files to work

I found that the media files, and plugins which work in Firefox didn't work in Flock, however geting this done took only a few minutes (and is an area the migration wizard should really improve on)

For this i simply copied the plugins from the /opt/netscape/plugins to /opt/flock/plugins with

cp /opt/netscape/plugins/*.* /opt/flock/plugins/.

Then copied the pluginsreg.dat from ~/.mozilla/firefox into the flock profile folder

cp ~/.mozilla/firefox/pluginsreg.dat ~/.flock/browser

Next i edited the pluginreg.dat file using nano in konsole

cd cd .flock/browser nano pluginreg.dat

And changed all the lines which pointed to /opt/netscape/plugins to /opt/flock.plugins, i did this as when i tried using flock with an unedited pluginreg.dat it ould not launch the media players, however editing did make a difference, as it all worked fine

With this done, restart Flock, and all should now work fine..

[edit] Firefox Extensions

Flock does offer support for basic firefox extentions, and so fa only the All in One Sidebar has failed on me..