Learning Ubuntu #4 - Pidgin, APMS, Slow Internet, Grub

So, last night, I spent some time with Pidgin. Look under "Applications > Internet", and select Pidgin. Select Accounts > Manage Accounts", and add your MSN account. Really straight forward, and seems to work OK. I have a couple of issues where my logon drops, but that may be because I am having an internet problem - more about that latter.

The other thing I did was set up Pidgin to start automatically. That is also easy. Select "System > Preferences > Startup Applications", click add, hit Alt+F2, scroll down to make sure the command name is "pidgin", hit cancel, fill in the name you want and set the command to "pidgin", click add, click close. Your done.

The other thing I did was fool around for an hour or so with power management. I mean that I was trying to get hibernate and suspend to work, including resume. Hibernate was straight forward - it just works. But, I screwed around with suspend and could not get it to work. Did a bunch of surfing, and found nothing that looked very helpful in the way of a fix, but lots of hits indicate the problem is fairly wide spread. It did sound like Ubuntu 9.10 might help, so I revisited power settings, and turned off all the suspend stuff, and just it the machine hibernate.

Next, I spent a couple of hours on my desktop with Wireshark trying to figure out the Internet is slow then fast - the good news is this is not an Ubuntu problem - reproduced on the Win XP machine. The bad news - I will have to talk to my ISP and get them to try and do something - never likely or very pleasant - sigh.

Also, found this post about a GUI to manage the grub boot manger: http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Jaunty#Use_Startup_Manager_to_change_Grub_settings - will give it a try, and report back! Two more things:

1. Per http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Jaunty#GRUB_boot_manager_settings you need to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to change descriptions and stuff like that.
2. I am a GUI guy, and wanted to do that from the Nautilus file browser, but you need to be root. Turns out to be simple - right click the file, select "open with other application", and specify "gksudo gedit". There may be ways to improve this