this has been a very adventurous day for me today.. i've learned a lot and have nearly have everything going the way i wanted it to.. but then i came across a problem..

i was playing with setting up a firewall with iptables.. adding in samba ports 137:139.. i then ran my firewall file.. nothin'.. i could not access my other computers.. i then commented out the lines i added and reran my firewall file..

i'm not sure if it was the first time or the second time i ran the firewall file.. but the internet for linux went out.. although it was still forwarding to my other copmuter fine.. this had happened to me earlier today.. and i found that restarting linux would reset the iptables. and everything would be good..

i have since learned you can add lines to the firewall file that allow it to be reran on the fly and nothing gets screwed up.. as it flushes everything first and then applies the rules.. check it

anyway.. when i restarted linux this time.. everything booted in fine.. i typed in my login name and password.. and then nothing.. the fedora background comes up but there is nothing loading..

all of the start up stuff works. like i have internet on my winxp machine and my website http://jimmyb.homeip.net is still up.. but i can't do anything on linux.. as the GUI doesn't properlyload up..

i decided to leave it for a while longer and it came up with an error saying 'looking for hard drive and trash folders'... and i had the option to push 'ok' so i did.. and nothing happen.. so i tried closing it which brought up the 'force quit' box.. so i did.. and now it's still sitting there.. with a blank blue boackground..

*edit.. correction.. what the actual error says is this:

'Nuatilus is searching your drives for trash folders'

everything good now.. i had to just let the system figure it out by letting it run for more than hour before it got into fedora properly.. those iptables are tricky things.