Some people have experienced a problem with Thunderbird failing to start after upgrading to 3.0.4+nobinonly-0ubuntu2 (see [1]). An updated version which fixes this bug has been uploaded already and the affected binaries removed from the archive. If you have already updated to the affected version and you are experiencing this problem, then you will need to recover manually in order to use Thunderbird again.

The issue is that under certain conditions, the thunderbird wrapper script replaces your profile with a recursive symlink. If you are running the affected version and thunderbird no longer starts, please open a terminal and run “ls -ld ~/.*thunderbird*”. If you see output similar to the following, then you are affected by this bug and will need to proceed with the instructions following.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 chr1s chr1s   24 2010-04-15 19:08 /home/chr1s/.mozilla-thunderbird -> /home/chr1s/.thunderbird
lrwxrwxrwx 1 chr1s chr1s   24 2010-04-15 19:08 /home/chr1s/.thunderbird -> /home/chr1s/.thunderbird
drwx—— 3 chr1s chr1s 4096 2010-04-15 19:08 /home/chr1s/.thunderbird.upstream

To recover from this, you need to:
1) Delete the recursive symlink (~/.thunderbird) by running “rm ~/.thunderbird”.
***Only do this if you see the output above, else you could be deleting your profile. If you are unsure, then rename the file instead***
2) Move ~/.thunderbird.upstream to ~/.thunderbird by running “mv ~/.thunderbird.upstream ~/.thunderbird”

Once you have done this, you will be able to open Thunderbird again.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards
Chris

[1] – https://launchpad.net/bugs/563893

mountall: error while loading shared libraries: libplybootclient.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.
init: mountall main process (265) terminated with status 127

It’s getting some attention at Ubuntu Forums here and here. There’s also a bug report already filed with a fix on the way.

If you find yourself stuck with a non-bootable Lucid, the posts and bug reports have some ideas. Myself, I used a workaround suggested by Rob2687 and loaded a Karmic LiveCD (LiveUSB key actually), mounted my root partition and added a new symbolic link.

sudo mkdir /mnt/root
sudo mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/root
sudo ln -s /mnt/root/lib/libply-boot-client.so.2.0.0 /mnt/root/lib/libplybootclient.so.2

My Lucid install was able to reboot successfully after this.

UPDATE: Updates have been pushed out to correct this situation with the following versions:
plymouth 0.8.0~-14
mountall 2.8

After some digging, I came across this Launchpad bug explaining the same condition. Lars Bengtsson’s comment explained with a link that there was a change in the gnome-power-manager package back in July that decided to hide the Do nothing option unless it was specified in GConf.

There are two ways to specify Do nothing in GConf. Pick what you’re more comfortable with. The GUI way is to press ALT-F2 and run gconf-editor. Use the tree to navigate to apps > gnome-power-manager > buttons > lid_ac and change it to nothing. The Long description that appears below in the Key Documentation area provides the other possible values.

From a command line, or in a terminal window, use the following command to change the value to nothing:

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/gnome-power-manager/buttons/lid_ac "nothing"

You should now see Do nothing as an option from within the Power Management application.

It’s only semi-persistent. Once you change the option to something else, Do nothing is hidden again. You’ll need to repeat the process to add it back. Some comments from the bug entry suggest this may not work for everyone. I suspect there are other issues preventing them from keeping an external monitor active with a laptop’s lid closed which I couldn’t suggest a reason.

How does one easily reset the preferences of Firefox?

philf: is there a way to ‘restore” to a previous days setting? all of a sudden firefox won’t open a site that requires flash [site removed] when trying to use it just a blue screen. I’ve had this issue before, I can’t remember how I fixed it, it was working yesterday perfectly. ALSO firefox used to open the previous tabs when closed, now just a blank screen..I didn’t do anything to it yesterday no updates at all…

This won’t exactly answer the question asked from the quoted IRC text, but as far as I know there isn’t a “snapshot” type service that can restore Firefox to a previous day’s settings. I would be surprised if someone hadn’t made a plugin for this scenario yet. What follows is an “all else fails” solution to just restore a default set of options in which to start over.

To paraphrase Mozilla’s own instructions:

1. Exit from Firefox completely (after copying/printing these instructions of course)
2. Locate your profile folder. This will probably be the most difficult step for new users as it lies within a “hidden” folder in your home folder. I’ll explain a little later.
3. Rename and/or remove your prefs.js file. Think safety first: rename now, remove later when clearly not needed.
4. Restart Firefox.

Firefox will rebuild the prefs.js upon restart to its default state. Some users may also have a user.js file which may or may not cause some issues. It’s not a default file and could possibly have been made by a plugin or another installed application. My user.js file was created for and by Google’s Picasa. Rename/remove it as well if you’re still experiencing issues.

The strategy of renaming a settings file is to ensure that you still have a copy in case you need it. Any time I find myself tweaking files, I will make a backup copy of it first (cp file file.bu). In the case of Firefox, we only need to rename it in order to force Firefox to save a new default file. We can always restore the original file be deleting the new one and renaming the original.

Your Firefox profile folder is contained in a folder named .mozilla that is hidden from normal viewing because of it’s leading dot or period. While viewing your home folder in nautilus’s file browser, you can use CTRL-H to show all hidden files. Open .mozilla then firefox. Within you should see a folder ending in .default. The first eight letters are randomly chosen for you when Firefox is first run. That’s your Firefox profile folder. Open that and you should see the prefs.js file. Continue with step 3 above.

Remember that within the profile folder is everything that Firefox knows about you including saved passwords and cookies. If you accidentally change the wrong file, you could prevent yourself from accessing certain websites.

While I was apparently on Google’s homepage, the address bar was still under the impression that I was at the Google Reader page. It was also not immediately displaying my home page when Firefox 3.5 launched. It turns out that ubufox, the Ubuntu Firefox Modifications plugin, isn’t quite compatible. Only after disabling it did Firefox 3.5 return to operating normally. All of my other plugins seem to function as expected.

Some other interesting tidbits from the screenshot:

• I am not the author of the ubufox plugin. I was still trying to figure out how Firefox handled plugins and used my troubleshooting skills by changing its name in order to show if I had made any progress.
• There is no version 2.02.00 of the Fast Video Download. I changed the version number for the very same reason I added my name to the ubufox plugin.

Things I learned in the process:

• Firefox keeps a record of the plugins in an extensions.rdf file located in the profile directory. Even after making changes to the necessary plugin files for both ubufox and Fast Video Download, Firefox 3.5 still wouldn’t allow me to enable them. It wasn’t until I removed the extensions.rdf file, which was later auto-generated by Firefox 3.5, that Firefox 3.5 finally recognized the version changes.
• The ubufox plugin is a global plugin and isn’t kept in your local profile directory. It’s install.rdf file is located at /usr/share/ubufox/install.rdf and is owned by root. The idea is still the same by locating the maxVersion and changing it to 3.5.* but using sudo instead. Unfortunately, it still prevents Firefox 3.5 from functioning normally.

Until a suitable replacement is made of the ubufox plugin, I recommend against changing its install.rdf file’s maxVersion entry. Since it’s a global plugin, any new user that is added to your computer will get a broken Firefox 3.5 setup.

Looking in the ~/.mozilla/firefox-3.5/(profile).default/extensions directory, replacing (profile).default with your own, you should see a directory for each of your extensions.

Using my own example, at ~/.mozilla/firefox-3.5/(profile).default/extensions/moonlight@novell.com I have Novell Moonlight installed. Within is a file called install.rdf which I needed to edit.

First I made a copy of it in case I broke it after editing it.

cp install.rdf install.rdf-original

Next, the permissions needed to be fixed in order to save any changes I make to the file.

chmod 0600 install.rdf

Now to edit it. I chose nano but any text editor will do.

nano install.rdf

Paging down to the bottom, I find the following section:

<Description>
  <em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
  <em:minVersion>1.5</em:minVersion>
  <em:maxVersion>3.1.*</em:maxVersion>
</Description>

I changed the maxVersion to 3.5.* and saved it.

<em:maxVersion>3.5.*</em:maxVersion>

Last thing to do was change the file permission back to a strict read-only.

chmod 0400 install.rdf

After giving Firefox 3.5 a restart, it was now possible to enable Novell Moonlight in lieu of a future update.

Keep in mind that this may or may not work with all Firefox plugins with some possibly causing havoc with Firefox itself. If that’s the case, you’ll need to reverse the changes you made and wait for an official update from the plugin’s programmers.

“… if you upgraded to gdm 2.26 since last Friday, updating your system under GNOME will kill the upgrade and your session in the middle of the update again, since there is no way for the fixed gdm version to override the previous version’s prerm script.”

For more information including steps to fix the issue, see the original email in the mailing list archives.

Just moments ago, 2.5.7 was officially released for everyone to download and enjoy.

Version 2.5.7 (06/20/2009)

• Yahoo Protocol 16 support, including new HTTPS login method; this should fix a number of login problems that have recently cropped up. (Sulabh Mahajan, Mike “Maiku” Ruprecht)
• Only display the AIM “Unable to Retrieve Buddy List” message once per connection. (Rob Taft)
• Blocking MSN users not on your buddy list no longer disconnects you.
• When performing operations on MSN, assume users are on the MSN/Passport network if we don’t get network ID’s for them.

Users can choose to either upgrade their clients or continue using the workaround that was posted by myself and a few others this weekend. Ubuntu users wanting to upgrade will either have to add Pidgin’s PPA repository or hope that Ubuntu backports the new version.

The Pidgin PPA has not been updated with 2.5.7, yet, as it’s only just been released from the time I’m writing this (<45 mins).

I had been wondering why Pidgin was having problems connecting to Yahoo’s Messenger service for the last two days or so. I eventually had to go to Pidgin’s IRC chat room to find a link to some relevant information.

Essentially Yahoo is upgrading the software on their servers which includes a new authentication method that Pidgin, and other non-Messenger clients, aren’t compatible with, yet.

The only workaround that seems functional is simply pointing the client to a pager server that hasn’t been upgraded yet. You can do that by clicking on Accounts > Manage Accounts > highlight Yahoo account > Modify > Advanced tab. You’ll see a entry for the pager server.

It should be set to scs.msg.yahoo.com which actually points to a number of different server addresses. I changed mine to cs101.msg.mud.yahoo.com which is currently working with Pidgin. Save the change and Pidgin should/might connect to Yahoo.

More information with additional server addresses can be found at Celtic Wolf.

UPDATE: Pidgin 2.5.7 was just released to fix a few issues including Yahoo’s Messenger service.

The answer to enabling that option is to simply create a directory.

mkdir ~/.config/autostart

Now the option is no longer grayed out and you can have gufw start for your every session.

You can install it from Ubuntu’s repositories. Make sure you have the universe repos enabled. You can find it in Synaptic or at the command line, issue:

sudo apt-get install gufw

It will need to download ufw and iptables if you don’t already have those.