At which point Firefox broke completely. No starty, no error – even when launched from the shell.

It’s taken me a little while, but I’ve tracked down the culprit: the Prism plugin.  If you’ve got Prism – a stand-alone Mozilla-based browser for creating desktop-style access to web apps – then the chances are you’ll be bitten by this bug, as installing Prism automatically installs the plugin into Firefox.

Thankfully, the fix is simple: go to Tools -> Add-Ons and disable Prism.

What’s that?  You can’t load Firefox in order to disable the Prism plugin?  There’s a fix for that, too.  Load a shell (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and type:

cd ~/.mozilla/firefox
ls

That’ll give you a listing of the directory – with a single entry, which is your profile folder.  Use cd to change to this directory, then type:

rm compatibility.ini

Once you’ve done that, Firefox should start fine and you’ll be able to disable the add-on.

If you’re curious, there’s a bug filed on Launchpad over here.

Well, ‘broken’ might be a bit steep – it no longer responds to a lid close event with the nice, neat standby mode it once treated me to.  Instead, it triggers the standby script and gets itself into a half-on, half-off state.

In this state, the power light is flashing to indicate that it’s in standby.  Unfortunately, it isn’t – everything’s still working fine.  The only indication that it even tried to standby is that my SD card unmount/remount script is triggered and the default keyring is locked.

Strangely this issue has only cropped up since I upgraded Ubuntu to the latest packages last night – a total of four updates.  I’ve ruled out three as being the issue – it’s not tzdata, winbind can be stopped without fixing the problem, and samba isn’t even running – and sadly can’t remember the fourth.

I’ve added my two-pennorth to a bug report on Canonical’s Launchpad, but considering that the issue appears to have been open since 2006 I’m not holding my breath.

It’s doubly irritating when you consider that since the purchase of my high capacity battery I’ve been using my netbook a lot more, and losing the ability to just slam the lid shut and shove it in my bag when I’m done is extremely vexing.

If anyone has any bright ideas, let me know. I’m at a loss with the damn thing.

As someone who uses – and likes – Ubuntu on most of his hardware, this is a surprise.  Sadly, it’s not that surprising – most people will always vote for the status quo.

I did write an article for Bit-Tech on the matter, but a real journalist did the same.  Accordingly, here’s the article that never made it:

Desktop Linux received a bitter blow recently with the news that Windows is by far the most popular operating system for low-cost netbook devices.

According to an article on InformationWeek, the latest figures from market research specialist NPD show Microsoft’s Windows operating system leading the way with a massive 96 percent share of the netbook market.

Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc describes the growth of Windows on the low-cost netbook platform – a platform that many believe originated with the Asus Eee PC, which was originally designed around a custom version of the Xandros Linux distribution – over the last year as “phenomenal.” With many manufacturers now offering Windows XP – and a few ambitious or foolhardy types even offering Windows Vista – as standard, Windows has blossomed from a mere 10 percent market share to an incredible 96 percent.

When one company gains market share, another loses – although in this instance it’s the open source Linux operating system which is has suffered for Microsoft’s success. LeBlanc claims that Linux on netbooks has directly contributed to Microsoft’s success in the market, saying that “[netbook owners] that try Linux are often returning it,” after realising that “their Linux-based netbook PC doesn’t deliver the same quality of experience” as a full-blown Windows system.

While it’s in Microsoft’s interests to downplay Linux wherever possible, the rhetoric – in this case, at least – is borne out by fact: mobile ‘phone specialist retailer The Carphone Warehouse quietly dropped Linux-based netbooks from its list of offerings after seeing a return rate of up to 20 percent – far higher than the same hardware running Windows XP.

Some of the issues that cause users to become frustrated with Linux-based netbooks could be down to expectations – with the overwhelming majority of retail software being designed for Windows alone, it’s easy to imagine users becoming frustrated at their inability to purchase add on applications for their netbook. Another reason for the high return rate could be the often locked-down and limited system offered by some manufacturers which prevents users from harnessing the true power of their new purchase – with special mention to the particularly poor hack job Asus did of the Xandros distribution for the original Eee PC range.

Whatever the reasons behind the seeming failure of Linux in the netbook market, Microsoft will be hoping that it can maintain its momentum as XP is phased out and replaced by Windows 7 – which LeBlanc says “will run great” on netbook hardware “no matter how [the] hardware evolves.” Likewise, companies behind rather more impressive netbook versions of Linux such as Canonical’s Ubuntu Netbook Remix and the Linux Foundation’s Moblin project will be praying they can reverse consumer opinion on netbook-based Linux.

Do you think that Windows will always be the consumer choice – even on restricted hardware such as netbooks – or are the manufacturers to blame for poor public opinion for offering badly implemented locked-down systems under the Linux name? Share your thoughts over in the forums.

To snag yourself some free Ubuntu stickers, simply pop a self addressed envelope across to:

The Linux Emporium
Bridge House
17a Maybrook Road
Sutton Coldfield
Birmingham
B76 1AL UK

They’ll drop a pack of four by return of post.  I think you’ll agree that it looks much nicer than the old “Designed for Windows Vista” sticker it replaces.

I decided the time had come to move to something a bit newer, however, and have just finished installing Ubuntu 8.04.  Using the ISO from the Ubuntu Eee website, it was a fairly painless install.  I was disappointed to see that the installer didn’t set up fstab in the manner I prefer – with a limited number of writes on the internal SSD available, I like to put /tmp, /var, and others on a tmpfs mount – but that was easily sorted.

What wasn’t quite so easy was the wireless.  Unfortunately, Asus have opted to use one of Atheros’s less supported wireless chipsets in the Eee – with no official Linux driver available.  The madwifi-ng driver included as part of the Ubuntu-Eee package sort of worked, but tended to drop out rather frequently – oddly, when the signal was at its strongest rather than its weakest.

Rather than put up with a spotty signal, I grabbed the madwifi-ng build I had from the original Ubuntu 7.04 install and compiled it on 8.04.  A quick reboot later and the wireless is back to its old reliable self again.  This way, I get the best of both words – the reliable wireless from Ubuntu 7.04, and the shiny new Compiz Fusion desktop effects from Ubuntu 8.04.

The driver I used for this is available here, so if you want to do the same as I did simply download the file and extract it as so:

tar xfvz eeewifi.tar.gz

Then start the compilation and installation process thusly:

cd madwifi-ng-r2756-20071018
make clean
sudo make install

Reboot, and your wireless should be working a treat!