photobucket, facebook photo uploader, and more

Hello everybody,

I recently got the Linux flavor of the Aspire One for my wife, so I could regain control of my own laptop. However, there are a few really annoying issues:

1. Photobucket freezes firefox whenever she tries to upload pictures. Every single time, without fail, she'll choose the pictures she wants to upload, clicks upload, and it freezes solid. I'm pretty sure I can kill it from the command line, but nothing else works.

2. I think it's related, but the facebook photo uploader does the same thing. The simple uploader works, but you can only upload 5 at a time or something like that, whereas she tends to upload 30-60 pictures at a time.

These first two issues are not exclusive to the aspire one, I also experience the exact same problem on my laptop with Ubuntu. Maddeningly I have not found anyone on the Ubuntu forums or on these with the same problem, so I'm posting in hopes that one of you out there figured this out on your own and can enlighten me.

3. Messenger's Yahoo protocol only works about half the time...probably less. It gives some crappily translated error:

Your Yahoo Messenger account
(screen name) is error
Could not establish a connection with
the server :
Error resolving scs.msg.yahoo.com:
Name or service not known

As far as I've seen the AIM side works every time, but this has me baffled. My wife said this morning that it worked when she first turned it on, but after she closed the lid and came back to it, it no longer did. This is not reproducible though, I just restarted and it doesn't work (although that kinda works out, since I wouldn't have gotten to pass on the error message).

4. Due to #3, I would like to install pidgin, but I get an error resolving dependencies...I hate RPM-based distros. The package manager wants to install pidgin 2.2.2-1.fc8.i386, which according to the wonderful error message, needs libpurple 2.2.2-1.fc8. Well wouldn't you know it, the version of libpurple in there is 2:2.3.1-2008071801.i386. Great, thanks Linpus Linux Lite.

5. Speaking of all of the above, I would love to update my package list and update the packages. Oh no, it ain't happenin. System>Software Updater? Conflicting packages. yum update? Conflicting packages. I'm going to start upgrading stuff one-by-one, wish me luck.

That's all I've got for now. Any suggestions are welcome. Can anybody help me, please?