Notices

After much poking, I've figured out a way to block lots of ads -- the giant banners on Yahoo were just killing me. It's only per-connection, for now.

1) Download the PAC file from http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/, unzip it and and transfer it to the 770.

2) Under Control Panel... Connectivity... Connections. Choose the connection of your choice. Keep hitting 'Next' until you get to the last screen & hit the 'Advanced' button (if anyone knows a way to get here easier, please say so).

3) Hit 'Use proxy', set 'HTTP proxy' to 'localhost' and 'Port number' to '3128' (or whatever - some unused port). Set 'Do not use proxy for' to 'localhost', check 'Automatic configuration' and set 'Automatic configuration web address' to 'file:///path/to/no-ads.pac' (e.g., 'file:///home/user/.opera/no-ads.pac' or 'file:///media/mmc1/no-ads.pac').

You may want to clear the browser's cache before testing. This kills the giant banners on the my.yahoo site, for me, at least.

I'll see if this can be made global. Worse comes to worse, a shell script using gconftool-2 can be used after each new connection.

Let me know what problems you run into.

HTH,

-b

Many of you may know this already, but for some, the 770 may be thier first Linux system.

You can block sights by adding bogus entries to the /etc/hosts file. I have my own small set of entries for sites that really bug me (Mostly flash ads).

DO NOT copy another hosts file to /etc/ The entries that are in there must remain.

Just add the bogus entries to the end of the file.

Reference link below for someone who maintains a huge host file for blocking sites.

http://everythingisnt.com/hosts

True, /etc/hosts will work as well, but the .pac file allows greater granularity than just per-host.