The webbook comes with the very very latest version of the Firefox web browser, version 3.0. This is a great broswer, but one of it’s fancy new features is a little less than helpful. Firefox can be put into “offline mode”, when in offline mode it won’t try to connect to websites, it will just display web pages stored in the cache. Pretty handy in principal, and this feature has been about for a while. The “great” new feature is that Firefox communicates with the network manager and can now detect when you are connected to the network with a wired or wifi connection. When you are not connected it automatically flips into offline mode. Still sounds like a good feature doesn’t it? Well the downside is that when you are connected to the internet on a 3G dongle (which is kind of the whole point of the webbook) Firefox has a chat with the network manager that goes a bit like this:
FF: “Hey, Network Manager, my user requested a page, am I connected to a wired network?”
NM: “nope, I have no wires plugged in”
FF: “how about wireless? Near any hotspots?”
NM: “nope, not associated with any hotspot right now.”
FF: “OK, I will go to offline mode”
The fact that there is a perfectly good mobile broadband connection sitting there online never comes into the conversation as the mobile broadband bit isn’t the responsibility of the network manager.
So how do we deal with this? Well we really really wanted to fix this before releasing the webbook, but all the fixes we found had nasty side effects that we couldn’t live with and a proper fix was promised in Firefox 3.0.1. Fortunately Firefox 3.0.1 was released to the Ubuntu repositories just a couple of days ago, so if you have done an automatic update recently you should have Firefox 3.0.1. Check by going to Help-About Mozilla Firefox and you should see the version number 3.0.1. If you still have 3.0 then look at the top of the screen for the red “updates available” icon. Click it and follow the prompts to install the available updates.
you might have to restart the webbook, or at least restart Firefox to get the update to take effect.
So now you have the updated firefox, that still doesn’t quite fix the problem. Firefox now has the ability to ignore the network manager, but we still need to tell it to do so. In the URL bar type “about:config”.
If Carlsberg made warning messages they would be like the Firefox one:
So if you promise to be careful, you will see a huge list of settings you can tweak. The one we are interested in is called toolkit.networkmanager.disable. To find this without scrolling through the big list just type “tool” in the filter box and the setting will leap into view.
Double click the setting and it will turn bold (to show it isn’t the default setting) and the value will change from false to true.
Now when you start Firefox with the broadband dongle connected you won’t have to turn off offline mode any more.
Tags: Firefox, Mobile Broadband
Thanks a lot for your help..it works so far and I don’t need to go to file and uncheck work offline…Ubuntu is great once you master it…
Hi Alan,
Sorry to be a nuisance but could you explain the procedure in installing any downloaded software on ubuntu..Like after downloading a file..what are the the steps to follow..Like windows it’s just with few clicks and that’s it,the software is installed…And also it would be great on how to uninstall unwanted files..
Next question is about the quality of the graphics,especially if you watch something on youtube!! The picture quality is not that good as windows,is there any way of improving that??
@heeman,
Can you be a bit more specific about the software you want to download and install? Generally everything you ever wanted and more is available from the Synaptic Package Manager. If you want to compile and install stuff from source code bundles from sourceforge for example you would generally uncompress a tarball then
./configure
make
sudo make install
but I am not sure you want to do that. Uninstalling unwanted files depends on how they were installed. If you installed them from Synaptic then you can uninstall them the same way. Can you link to a specific YouTube Video please. They are of variable quality so we need to be discussing the same one. I have found that the frame rate drops when attempting to play some videos full screen, probably because it has to upscale them. Viewing in the window means that 1 pixel of the video stream maps to one pixel of the screen, which intuitively seems less work than smearing one pixel from the data stream over several screen pixels and blending them together so it looks smooth. If we had graphics drivers that let us use the on board MPEG decoder then all that work would be offloaded from the CPU to the GPU.
hi please could you help me? brought a webbook today but cant get it onto the internet we have an 02 dongle should this work or do we need 3G? if it should work please please can u tell me how to do this?
thanks emma
Hi Emma,
what model of dongle is it precisely? It should be printed on the dongle somewhere in ridiculously small text. All the mobile broadband dongles are 3G (3G is the third Generation, second was GSM, first was analog mobile phones) just one of the operators decided to confuse everyone by calling themselves “Three”
hi it says NRM-MC930D
OK, that isn’t one that gets sold with the webbook and I haven’t got one of them to test, however there is a pretty good chance that it will work. I am doing some articles in a few days on the mobile broadband thing. The program we commissioned is called wader and on the project page for that http://public.warp.es/wader they do mention the Novatel Ovation MC930D as a supported dongle.
Hey Alan,
Me again…
I’m finally on the web! Yippee…
Just having a bit of an issue once connected. I can manage to get to almost every website I’ve tried, however once I’m on it and click to go to another page (on the same website) it tries for ages and then gives up and says “page load error. Connection interrupted. The document contains no data. The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.”
It tells me to try again but it will never load. I tried it millions of times…no exaggeration!
The internet connection isn’t playing up because we have another laptop that’s working fine…
Have you come across this before?
Many thanks in advance, amy.
PS when I tried to press “submit comment” on this page it took forever and then bought up a “wp-comments-post.php. – bluefish 1.0.7″ window. I’ve had to write this all on my blackberry because the webbook won’t subbit it… Hmmmmm….
Alan, is there any chance of doing a Tutorial on how to connect with an ADSl modem? my son and i are trying to convince his ‘book to connect to a Speedtouch, but when we try to find the revision type as suggested on the Ubuntu help pages we get:
grep: /proc/bus/usb/devices: No such file or directory
Tried booting with the modem connected and connectngn after booting, same message. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
iain
@Iain
what is a speedtouch? can you post a link. Not sure why you are using grep and looking in /proc. If it is a USB device then you can type
lsusbto see some information about it. Not sure why your ADSL modem would be a USB device though.Thomson Speedtouch ADSL modem.
I followed the instructions in the help files in the webbook, and here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsbAdslModem/SpeedTouch
but got no information, and didn’t want to just resort to trying either software revision to see which one worked in case I knackered the thing out of the box.
wow, it really is a USB ADSL modem! So it has no network ports or wireless then? I am sure you could get it to work but it is going to be a bit of a challenge and you will only be able to use one computer at a time with your ADSL connection and you are tied to a USB lead. You might find that investing £30 or so for a cheap wireless ADSL router would be well worth it.
Hey Alan,
Any idea how to solve my issues with the internet, above?
Many thanks in advance, Amy
@Amy,
sorry, I am drowning a bit responding to comments, I think it may be nearly time to set up a forum rather than a blog. As to your problem, I did contemplate it for a while without finding enlightenment. I have a suspicion that it is something wierd in your firefox profile somewhere. If you delete the profile then it will be recreated possibly in a better state (or at least it will rule out some things) this will delete your history and bookmarks and suchlike. Go to a terminal window, it should start up at your home directory and the prompt will be something like
amy@webbook:~$type inrm -rf .mozillaNext time you start firefox it will recreate the profile. Let me know if that helps.I’m so sorry…I just realised how impatient I sounded before! You’re too good and know too much which is why no-one will permit you a life beyond this website!
Unfortunately, however, the advice you gave above hasn’t worked. It did clear everything so I’m sure I did it correctly, but still some websites aren’t loading correctly. When I try one it says “transferring data from static.ak.fbcdn.net…”. I don’t think I’ve seen this before. Might it have something to do with my problems?
I’ve found HUNDREDS of people complaining of the same problems (on google) but I cannot find anyone with a resolution? They seem to think it’s something to do with firefox and firewalls but this ubuntu/linux/firefox is soooo new to me and I really haven’t a clue.
@amy,
I did a bit of googling too. This seems to sometimes affect both Windows Vista and Ubuntu, both support IPv6 which a good thing in general, but can cause problems if a router half supports it (roughly speaking – I didn’t understand all of if). Can you go to about:config and go past the warning (dragons are nice) and filter for network.dns.disableIPv6 and double click on it to turn it from false to true. Restart firefox and see if that helped.
Sorry, I’m not using wireless with young kids about, and buying one would make it more expensive than a windows machine, which kind of defeats the purpose.
Refuses point blank to work with any of the solutions on any of the help pages, won’t load Modem Manager after umpteen attempts, ebay and buying an Advent is looking more enticing every minute.
Hi again. Yes I tried that a couple of days ago. Unfortunately didn’t work. Just tried it for a second time but still no luck. During my lengthy searches on google a few people mentioned that it might be because of any firewalls or security features…i have no idea how to find out whether i have any of these, and if i do, are they on and causing my issues?? I have a linux webbook
Since this is here for posterity.
If anyone else is having difficulty with a USB modem, don’t bother with the help pages, because the scripts don’t work with the Webbook, neither does USB Modem Manager (at time of writing). Buy an ethernet router, £18 from Aria or similar,setup is simple, or buy an Advent 4211 running Windows, (better spec than the Windows Webbook for the same price).