Odd little problem this, hope someone can point me in the right direction?

I have just installed Mandrake LE 2005 on my slave hard drive, I haven't yet installed any other packages.

I tried last night to post a question on this forum, I could log in fine and typed my question but when I hit submit, nothing happened. No error messages, no nothing.

Do I need to install a piece of software in order to post questions? I'm currently using my windows partition but I don't want to keep on running back to Richmond every time something goes awry on my Linux box. I've also had this problem when running other distros.

Any advise or links to tutorials would be appreciated :-)

I run the same distro at home and have no problems posting with Firefox.

Maybe something cookie-related? Are you sure you're not dropping them?

box_car_willy, that is odd. Can you try another web browser? Try konqueror, epiphany, Opera, Mozilla, etc. and report back? if it fails then, you might have proxy server or firewall issues between you and the board. I assume this is not the case since you were able to post your question, presumably from the same machine running Windows?

If another web browser works, we have verified it's not a software firewall on your machine, and it's an issue with firefox. Great. Next up we need to start Firefox in safe mode. Open an xterm/konsole and switch to the firefox directory (often /opt/Mozilla-firefox but YMMV. I installed mine in /opt/firefox) and run:

/.firefox -safe-mode

And try posting then. What this does is it loads Firefox with the default settings and no extensions. If it works at this point you can either try deleting your Firefox profile or you can remove the offending extension(s) depending on the specific cause of the problem (once safe mode works, it's a process of elimination)

Also, as others suggested, check edit -> preferences -> privacy and make sure cookies are enabled.

Hi, box-car-willy,

I had a similar problem until I noticed that I had forgotten to make an exception in my browser (firefox) for allowing www.linuxquestions.org to set session cookies. Doing that solved the problem in my case. I see KimVette and Mara had the same idea.

If it turns out that you DO allow this website to put cookies in your computer, did you use guarddog to configure a firewall? This is a very nice firewall scripting tool which came with my SimplyMEPIS 3.3 cdrom. Technically, it is not itself a firewall, but is a tool with a nice interface which configures your iptable. This provides the basic "firewall" functionality in modern linux, but iptables are challenging for newbies like us, hence guarddog. Now you know as much as I know, or think I know, about how firewalls work! (I hope I didn't misinform you.)

Even if you never ran guarddog, I think you can open it now and use it to check that you allow users on your machine (you) to request http service from the internet, or at least from this website. Read the guarddog help; it's pretty interesting, although I am not really sure I understand everything it says. Note that apparently you can create a special "zone" for all the forums where you are a registered user, and you can set up permissions/services appropriate to each zone. Unfortunately, the guarddog help doesn't have very many examples of this.

I just installed guarddog on my Mandriva 2005 LE machine. It looks pretty sweet so far.

The problem is the same for all browsers - I will check if I have guarddog installed tonight (currently at work) and then post more.
Thanks for all the advice so far

I think I'll close this thread down thanks, my whole Linux experience is falling apaprt at the minute. As well as not being able to post here I cannot log into some sites, others are ok. I thought I would first try to update Firefox, and to do it using rpm because I really want to do as much as I possibly can using the CLI. Two days later, I've got nowhere, I am just getting a huge raft of error messages every time I try to do anything and frankly it's getting me down. I am always reading how simple rpm is to use, well I don't see it myself.

I want to sort through these error messages as well, but should I add them to this original posting or should I open a new post? I read in the posting etiquette document that it is always better to post to an existing thread than open a new one, but does that apply when you have two totally different problems? I've gone onto rpm error messages because of the path I took to fix my Firefox problem so to me it's connected, but would this forum see it that way?

This might not be the distro for you then. Instead of giving up on linux, try another distribution. I'm very new to Linux (not even a month yet) and I've been using Fedora Core 4. It has worked for me so far.

I know what you mean by Linux frustration Part of learning.

As far as the RPM thing, atleast with Fedora Core 4 they have a package manager called yum that will auto install any other dependencies that you need to run the software that you want.

GL!

I just feel that if I learn a distro specific GUI installation tool then I will make it harder for myself in the long run, whereas if I get rpm and dpkg sorted out then I can work with any distro in the future. I want to really understand what is going on under the hood in Linux - after running AdAware on my Windows box and finding 79 pieces of spyware, I want to take control of my own pc and Linux gives me that chance.

I've certainly been tempted by Yum - also Mepis uses Synaptic Package Manager and that handles dependencies beautifully. It just feels like cheating!

Maybe I just like making life hard for myself..!

I think the only universal way to install across all distributions would probably be compiling from source. So if you learn that then you should be all set. Distribution specific stuff isn't too bad but Yum is a great tool and I use it when I can

rpm sucks. Linux often balks when you try to fix problems- when you are a newbie. Try a reinstall, and try again. (and it's Redmond, not Richmond ) Mandriva might not be the distro for you. I screwed up *don't ask how many* linux installs- so take heart- you'll eventually work it out. My suggestion is to reinstall and try again. (which is a pest with mandriva, but anyway)

don't give up on linux. It will click someday.
titanium_geek

I think I will give compiling from source a go, I know I'll need to be aware of rpm and dpkg but if I can avoid all this nonsense (taking two days to update firefox, I ask ya!) then it will be worth it.

Think I might switch to ubuntu as well, I keep reading how that is newbie friendly

and yes, I did indeed write Richmond. I was probably very vexed when I wrote it and wasn't in my right mind, rpm can do that to you it seems...

slackware sounds like the distro for you. you'll learn "under the hood" with slack, guaranteed.

what synaptical said. dpkg and rpm aren't neccesary to learning linux- they are for learning debian and RH-mandy-suse (eww...) learn how to unpack a tar.gz file, how to ./configure make && make install

and how to edit a configuration file.

titanium_geek