After using QQ under Pidgin for a while, I found that sometimes there would be problems on login and that Pidgin would sometimes automatically disable QQ after a number of failed login attempts. It turns out that this can be easily fixed by selecting “Manage Accounts” and then “Modify” for the QQ account.

In the advanced settings tab, make sure that QQ2008 is selected (the default may well be QQ2005). It seems that this later version is more stable and login should no longer be a problem.

* modprobe vboxnetflt failed. Please use 'dmesg' to find out why

This can easily be solved with the following commands:

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Then reinstall Virtualbox to make sure that everything is working properly now:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall virtualbox-2.2

That should produce no error messages now.

HTTPError: HTTP Error 400: Bad Request

The Traceback is as below:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/gwibber/microblog/__init__.py", line 50, in get_data
    for message in method(client):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/gwibber/microblog/twitter.py", line 207, in responses
    for data in self.get_direct_messages():
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/gwibber/microblog/twitter.py", line 182, in get_direct_messages
    "https://twitter.com/direct_messages.json"))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/gwibber/microblog/twitter.py", line 158, in connect
    url, data, headers = {"Authorization": self.get_auth()})).read()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 124, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 389, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 502, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 427, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 361, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 510, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)
HTTPError: HTTP Error 400: Bad Request

At first I thought that this was a problem with Gwibber, however, after a bit of research, it turns out that this is a problem at Twitters end. Basically, Twitter recently changed their API and now limits the number of update requests you can make per hour using Gwibber. If you have your Gwibber client set to update too regularly (i.e. every minute or so) then it will run out of update permissions before the hour is over and you will get lots of error messages. It is therefore recommended to set the update frequency to something a bit higher (5 minutes should be fine) and hopefully you shouldn’t see the error any more.

If you want to know how many more Twitter update requests you have remaining (for the current hour), there is a simple curl command that you can enter in a terminal that will prompt you for a password and then provide the info you need.

$ user@jonoxps:~$ curl -u yourusernamehere http://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.json
$ Enter host password for user 'yourusernamehere':
$ {"reset_time_in_seconds":1243702342,"remaining_hits":0,"hourly_limit":100,"reset_time":"Sat May 30 16:52:22 +0000 2009"}

Sure enough, as soon as the clock turned 16:52:22, my hourly_limit went back up to 100 and Gwibber started working again!

Hopefully that should clear things up for a few of you, there is more information about the bug on Launchpad.

Thankfully, I googled around and found a very simple solution to this problem. It appears that in all my hastiness to clear up and delete files, I also deleted the Documents folder from my home directory. Whilst I didn’t keep anything in this folder and didn’t use it at all, apparently it is necessary for Nautilus to display icons on the desktop.

To set your desktop back on the rails, simply do the following command (first make sure that you have indeed deleted your Documents folder and that it is not something else that is causing this problem for you):

mkdir ~/Documents

You should not need root privileges to execute the above command.

Hope that worked for you too – now just log out and back in again and your desktop should once again be full of clutter!

1. Hit the F11 key twice – this should bring firefox back to a normal state where the title bar at the top is visible.
2. Double-click twice on the title bar (this should resize firefox – and may well make the window look a little strange or out of proportion due to the nature of this bug).
3. Now close firefox (Ctrl + Q).
4. Open Firefox again and double click on the title bar to maximise the window.

As strange as it may seem, this should solve the problem completely. Hopefully the developers will look into this and fix the bad code aswell – but at least you have a workaround for the moment.

This bug has been logged on Launchpad.