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M. Liébana and M. Marquina CN/DCI
Netscape Communications Corporation granted CERN an educational licence at the end of August 1995. This fact clarified finally the usage of the popular Netscape browser on site, and allowed making version 1.1N publicly available to all UNIC, PC and Mac nodes on the CERN site.
Its customization varied slightly compared to the first official version 1.0N. We describe in what follows those differences.
Netscape is a resource-consuming application which needs many entries in the colourmap of the display in which it is running. Since the number of these entries is a limited resource, it may happen that your display runs out of colourmap entries making all applications running in the same display show weird colours.
To solve this problem Netscape (and other well-designed applications) provide a way to install a private colourmap so that its high number of colours does not consume entries in the display's colourmap, and thus, it does not affect the colours of other applications running in the same display. However, this solution has a drawback: each time the mouse pointer enters/leaves a Netscape window a flash is produced in the display caused by the installation/removal of the private colourmap.
The default invocation of Netscape at CERN installs the private colourmap. If you don't like this default it is possible to override it invoking Netscape with the -no-install command line option (i.e. ``netscape -no-install'').
When beta releases of new versions of Netscape are made available for testing you can get access to the latest beta release by specyfing the -version beta command line option (i.e., netscape -version beta). As of the publication of this CNL a beta version of Netscape 2.0 is available.
Following several requests from users of Netscape, and trying to provide missing functionality, we have added two files to the Netscape installation in ASIS:
/usr/local/lib/netscape/mime.types
/usr/local/lib/netscape/mailcap
Both files contains the most relevant official MIME types defined by the
IANA
and others that, although not
yet official, can be useful. The latter MIME types are designated
with the prefix "x-".
These files will solve the problem reported by many Netscape users about PostScript files not being displayed through Ghostview, but saved to the local disk.
If you think that there is an important MIME type (official or not) that should be included in these files, please contact User.Support@cern.ch.
The netscape application for the PC is fully configured on NICE. It is accessible from the "World Wide Web" group which can be installed through the "More Groups" icon in the "Applications" group. Questions should be sent to nice.support@cern.ch.