Getting mGSD to work on Chrome under Ubuntu

mGSD is a getting things done organizer for your web browser. It’s based on TiddlyWiki. It’s pretty neat.

Anyway, out of the box, you can’t use mGSD on Google Chrome because it needs a java plugin and the ability to store cookies. The former may work out of the box for you, but you’ll need a special flag for Chrome to grant a local html file the ability to store cookies.

I’m using Ubuntu 11.04 (64 bit) with the Unity interface on my new netbook. Also, I’m not using chromium, available through Synaptic, I’m actually using a Chrome I downloaded for Google. Anyway, here’s how you do it.

Edit the file ~/.local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop. Scroll to the bottom where you see the line

Exec=/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome %U

Change it to:

Exec=/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --enable-file-cookies %U

Next, kill openjdk:

sudo apt-get remove default-jdk openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jdk
sudo apt-get autoremove

And install sun’s JDK:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre sun-java6-fonts

Finally, tell Chrome about the new plugin. If you’re on a 32 bit machine, use i386 instead of amd64 in the next command.

sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins/

Then restart Chrome and you should see the java plugin if you browse to chrome://plugins. Now try running and saving your very own mGSD.