Basically it was never completing the upload, no time-out, no error, nothing.

A LOT of digging around out there via google eventually landed me on a bug report which mentioned changing the MTU settings in the network config. I found this well explained in a post taking you through making the changes.

For the record, I changed my MTU settings to 1450 via the network connections gui, and hey presto, uploading to Flickr is working again!

So one less excuse at least….!

Photo credit: Cell105 – What keeps us connected…

Tonight I did, and a quick search on google lead me to this post on Joe Wein’s blog with a clear explanation on how to solve the issue:

Last month I upgraded my notebook from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 (”Hardy Heron”). Since then, whenever I tried tried to install the up to 133 updates that had become available, the Update Manager would hang indefinitely instead of prompting me for the user password.

If you’re in the same situation, the following tips might help you. Edit /etc/hosts with an editor of your choice (e.g. sudo vi /etc/hosts). There should be two entries with IPv4 addresses starting with 127.0.x.x, like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 mycomputername.mydomain

Remove the domain name from the entry starting with 127.0.1.1, leaving only the computer name and save the file. Now try again.

When I made this change I got the password prompt as expected and all the updates where downloaded and applied.

Thanks Joe!

Well tonight it just got too much for me, and I decided it was time to look into the cause.

A quick google search had me run “top” from a command line, which showed that a process by the name of “kacpi_notify” was consuming all the available CPU! So another search lead me to this page on the fantastic ubuntuforums.org, with a possible solution.

So just for the record, I applied the following changes:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Then modified the line:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-386 root=UUID=d17c8a59-107b-4454-9369-f24aaa7776f0 ro quiet splash


to

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-386 root=UUID=d17c8a59-107b-4454-9369-f24aaa7776f0 ro acpi=off apm=off quiet splash


Lets hope that does the trick!

So I did a google, and read a few recommendations for Amarok, which I gave a go. So far so good, I am quite impressed. It has some really nice features which help get the most out of your music, and supposedly keeps track of the files and statistics even as you move them around. My next step is to organise things, moving the music off of my old Windows partition onto the new hard disk, we’ll see how I get on.

I hope they get on all right with it, Dad seemed a little worried for a while, we had a go with the liveCD before the moment of truth.

Install went pretty smoothly, though it did stop at one point the first time round. One thing I did forget though, Ubuntu doesn’t have any modem drivers, so they might not yet be able to read this! Opps!

Of course, all this really is a cunning plan to finally get Dad to fork out a few quid every month to get broadband! How else do you get someone who thinks it “won’t make him enjoy the internet more” up with the times!?

So, Mum, I hope you manage to get a network card installed OK, and back online soon!

I guess this applies to any install of Firefox, not just a linux version. Check it out, mine was almost unusable before making these changes. Begs the question why the settings weren’t defaults….?

Update:

Following a little more digging, also found these quite useful:

lifehacker.com: top firefox 2 config tweaks

tweakguides.com

Easy! If you’re like me and using mozilla Thunderbird and Firefox!

And when I say easy, it really couldn’t have been easier! I am talking of simply copying two folders. Yes, a simple copy and paste!

So I thought I’d write this up, firstly to remind myself if one day I have to rinse and repeat, but also on the off chance someone else stumbles across this whilst trying to do the same thing. It would be nice to know this helped someone somewhere, or there is any way of making this even easier! If so, please leave a comment and say hi! Oh, and check out my little disclaimer before blaming me for breaking something!

I started with a quick search on google, but it didn’t really come up with anything concrete. So I took the plunge and said, well, lets see if this works. My steps were basically what I thought as a logical extension to the backup method you will find in the google search above.
So just to explain the tricky bit in a little more detail(no, thats not a gotcha!), what to copy, and where to paste it.

Firefox

1. Open Firefox on your linux systym and make sure you’re online. This will ensure you have a profiles folder created. Don’t bookmark anything new, as we’ll be over-writing this.
2. Copy the folder containing your profile folder in WinXP to the clipboard if you are able to see these files in linux (I was as my ubuntu installation mounted my windows partitions! Cool huh!). If you can’t access your windows files from your linux system (maybe you’re moving to another pc) copy them to a usb pendrive or some other media you can then access in linux. I mean the whole folder, including the following three files/folders:

• Profiles folder
• pluginreg.dat
• profiles.ini

Mine were located in C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Mozilla

1. Find the folder containing your profile in linux. Mine was here: home\.mozilla\firefox (you may need to check you have selected the option to view hidden files)
2. As I had already been using firefox on my linux system, I had a profile created anyway. I created a new folder “temp” and moved all the existing files there just in case.
3. Paste your files copied from WinXP into this folder (not the temp folder!).
4. Now rename the pluginreg.dat file (I called it pluginreg1.dat) and move the original back out from the “temp” folder. Otherwise firefix won’t start up. I found this one out the hard way. I am guessing it is because the plugins are different on linux and windows.
5. Start firefox!

Yes, thats it! You should now have all your extensions, bookmarks, history, passwords, everything. Just as it was in WinXP!

Thunderbird

I actually did this one first, as I was dreading having to recreate all my accounts and export/inport all my email and contacts. I shouldn’t have worried!

1. Open Thunderbird on your linux systym and make sure you’re online. This will ensure you have a profiles folder created. I don’t think you need to bother creating a new account or anything new, although I did whilst investigating.
2. As for firefox, copy the folder containing your profile folder in WinXP to the clipboard or a usb pendrive. Again, I mean the whole folder, including the following three files/folders:

• Profiles folder
• profiles.ini
• registry.dat

Mine were located in C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Thunderbird

1. Find the folder containing your profile in linux. Mine was here: home\.mozilla-thunderbird (you may need to check you have selected the option to view hidden files)
2. As I had already been using thunderbird, I had a profile created anyway. I created a new folder “temp” and moved all the existing files there just in case.
3. Paste your files copied from WinXP into this folder. (not the temp folder!)
4. Start thunderbird!

I’m getting repetitive, but again, that should be it! All your email, accounts, contacts and extensions up and running on linux!

Disclaimer!

I managed this with no real idea whether it would work or not, and I certainly have no idea whether it is the “correct” way of going about it! I can say it worked for me, and I don’t consider it risky as long as you keep your original files in linux. Your WinXP configurations are obviously untouched.

What amazed me is how simple it was to move it all from windows to linux, and I guess any other supported OS.

Mozilla software really is cross-platform! Great stuff!

In the end I bought an ADSL router which I was able to configure for both windoze and linux without too much hassle. This afternoon has been spent having fun exploring the repositories and installing loads of updates.

What has amazed me is how smooth it has all been, getting online, listening to some music and moving across my Thunderbird email. I’ll try to go into more details of what I have managed to get working in the next few days, along with my thoughts as I really start to use it. But if things carry on in this vein, I can’t see myself spending much time in WinXP!