Maybe you'll remember I had problems opening files in Firefox from TBird. If I clicked a link, it wouldn't automatically open in Firefox. Here's the solution. Under Edit => Preferences => Advanced => General, you have "System defaults" which says "Always check to see if Firefox is the default browser on startup". This option should be checked under all circumstances if you plan to use Firefox by default. Here's why I didn't check it. While checking other options a while back, I saw this one and thought I didn't need this as I only use Firefox to view html files. If ever any application made Konqueror the default, I'd just have to come back and remake a check mark to the option. But this never happened. What happened is that when Firefox was upgraded from 3.5.6 to 3.5.8, Firefox just stopped opening when I clicked a link in TBird. That's when Evolution, where links didn't open either, was kind enough to provide the following message: "Failed to execute child process "/usr/lib64/firefox-3.5.6/firefox" (No such file or directory). Of course, I have 3.5.8 installed." So, somehow, Firefox wasn't pointing to the right version. Of course, I didn't know that this had anything to do with selecting the default browser. Yet, it did!!! When I clicked the "Check now" button, everything came back to normal. May I ask why you have to check the "default browser" option to update to a new *version* of Firefox? Need I add that, before finding the solution, I wandered the Web for hours examining options like adding: user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http","mozilla-firefox"); user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https","mozilla-firefox"); to prefs.js ? &&& Same goes for my "pdf files not opening in Evince from Firefox" problem: mozplugger wasn't enabled. In Plugins, under Mozplugger, one can read "handles Quick Time and Windows Media Player plugin" Not a word about Evinve. A few months ago, I had problems with opening WMV files and somebody told me that gstreamer or gMplayer or something in the paraphernalia could handle this correctly and that MozPlugger could prove a hinderance. So, I believe I disabled it... and, strangely, had no problem with pdf files until Firefox -- and maybe Evince too? -- was updated. &&& While I was searching to solve the Firefox problem, I thought I'd take a break an see how things worked with SeaMonkey. Everything was fine. So I thought I'd test it further and I imported "Everything" from Thunderbird. I checked a few newsgroups and, I suppose that it's after rebooting that all the data disappeared both from Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. Lost! All the messages I had saved! (Of course, I had a recent back-up. Still...) I went into .thunderbird and saw all files were there in ".foo.default/Mail/Local Folder". But a "Local Folder-1" had been created which was empty and apparently the only one available to use. Anyways, I finally recovered all the data from a back-up but, once again, what a pain! Is it just me who has this kind of problems? Sometimes I believe that I don't have a single application that works 100% correctly or for which the information is correct. &&& When I search "alsa" in Dolphin, the best file browser I found so far, I get: nepomuksearch:/?sparql=select distinct ?r where { { { ?r ?v1 ?v2 . ?v2 bif:contains "'alsa*'" . } UNION { ?r ?v1 ?v3 . ?v3 ?v4 ?v2 . ?v4 <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#subPropertyOf> <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#label> . ?v2 bif:contains "'alsa*'" . } . { ?r a ?v5 . ?v5 <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#subClassOf> <http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/03/22/nfo#FileDataObject> . } UNION { ?r a ?v6 . ?v6 <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#subClassOf> <http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/03/22/nfo#Folder> . } . } . } &&& Klipper is the best clipboard manager I have found. Still, sometimes I select something in a web page and it doesn't enter the clipboard; I have to select it twice. At other times, the selection enters the clipboard but doesn't paste, even though it's on top of the clipboard entries. I must reselect it in the clipboard before it pastes. &&& Oh, a really funny one. Here's what Knode looked like when I opened it today: http://cjoint.com/?dgcNjJBH6c What's this: Loca... O... Sent Dr... Moving the vertical bar doesn't lengthen the names and I saw no option in the menus for this. Anyway, it doesn't make sense. Why do "Loca" and "Sent" have 4 letters whereas "O" has only one and "Dr" -- for drafts, I suppose -- just 2? Even if there was an option in a menu, I'm sure it couldn't create such a mess. &&& Then, there is this problem with my BIOS, which leaves me the only options of setting the user and Superuser passwords. I shorted the CMOS and everything went back to normal. Rebooted, no more options again. Of course, there's a sleuth of different mobos but I bought mine 8 months ago and it was out in Asia roughly 6 months earlier. It's really funny to learn from people here that market share isn't important, because Linux isn't a business. Apparently, making mobos is, though... Maybe if Linux had more market share, we'd get the drivers more easily, open... or closed. &&& Some people might suggest that, since I'm far from an expert, I should switch to Ubuntu. Well, I did try Mint in order to see if it could get sound to my TV. It booted to a black screen. YAC! (Yet Another Coaster!) &&& I could go on like this for days. It reminds me of when I began using Linux in 2001 and it was "Next year everything will get better." So, I can't help but to wonder: do you people, for instance, work with clipboard managers that work flawlessly? If I'm the only one with those problems, I suppose I'm dealing with a skewer of very imaginative hackers. And this, despite my modem/router being so fully stealthed at grc.com that I can't even make a traceroute; despite not offering a single service; despite having SELinux fully enabled and making updates as soon as they are available. Is there a security problem with Fedora despite having all the security options enabled? If you indeed experience at least some of the bugs I'm facing, how come they don't get fixed? Don't you all fill bug reports to tell the Klipper developers that "New File" gets into the clipboard every time you create a new file, being, of course, assured that the poor developers all have such peculiar hardware at hand that, they never noticed the bug that has driven everybody crazy for years? I've heard that Red Hat 6 will be based on Fedora 12 and 13. What will the New York Stock Exchange have to deal with: bugs or security holes? If we all face the same non hardware related bugs -- meaning I'm not speaking here about my mobo and sound problems --, isn't this driving most people away from Linux? Is the way of dealing with this saying, like some people on this group: "You don't like the way Linux doesn't work? Well, get this: we're not McDonald. Go away!" Isn't recognizing the problems the first step in dealing with them? Then, maybe there should be a repository for default software, the ones against which the least bugs have been found. Or a 1 to 5 star system that would entice developers to do a cleaner job. Maybe you have other solutions, but I'm afraid that, while programmers can tune Linux into doing wonderful things, on the Desktop, the development model just doesn't work. The problem is not that people are not filling in enough bug reports. Some developers just don't care. As a matter of fact, from all the resources I saw available to Windows Firefox and TBird users while researching my problems, it seemed that more are available to Windows users than to Linux users. In such a context, with Firefox, TBird, OOo, The GIMP, Apache and so much more(1), available to Windows users, what's the incentive for them to switch to Linux? (1) See a list on those 2 pages: http://www.opensourcewindows.org/ I'm sure Ballmer kicked his developers' ass until they provided a completely flawless clipboard application. Most probably, with Windows, I wouldn't have any problem with my mobo and sound. After using Linux exclusively for 8 years, I almost feel as if the Linux community was telling me I should run to the store where I bought my computer and ask for the OEM version of Windows before my one year guarantee period is over. Whatever nonsense Mr White might throw at me to state that real Linux believers never admit there's a problem, I say there is a HUUUUGE problem. And, like it or not, this is my contribution.