How to fix the Debian Lenny bug in which Epiphany always starts in "working offline" mode

I'm just a user and wordy blogger, and I find it fascinating to learn how bugs are dealt with in software projects like Debian. I do hope my 2.6.24 kernel-related sound problem gets resolved (even though I can just use an older kernel and have all the sound I want).

The other bug that's bugging me is this one, in which the Epiphany browser (but not Iceweasel/Firefox) always starts in the "working offline" mode, no matter whether I have the Internet connected or not.

I don't know whether or not the Debian team is going to get around to "fixing" this bug, since there's a fix out there that anybody can do. Curiously, I had to find it in another Debian bug report.

Here it is: If you launch the Epiphany browser, and can't get a Web page to come up (or you get a version of the page from the time you last had Epiphany working properly), check under the File menu to see if the "Work Offline" box is checked. If it is, you've got the bug.

You can just uncheck the box every time you launch Epiphany, or you can fix it this way, using Debian's gconf tool (and no, you don't have to be root to do it):

$ gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/epiphany/general/managed_network false

That's it. Epiphany is now behaving itself.

I'm not opposed to the occasional long line of code at the console, but if you're trying to get new users, this ain't the way to get it done. These things need to be fixed so the users don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they run into a problem.

Not a bug, but an annoyance easily fixed: I added my 4-year-old as a user on the Debian Lenny laptop, on which she loves using Gcompris, Tuxpaint and Childsplay. But her account didn't have working sound by default. It turns out that Debian is very conservative when it comes to granting privileges to new users; I turned on sound for her under System -- Administration -- Users and Groups. I clicked open her account, went to Properties and clicked the box for "Use audio devices" under the User Privileges tab.

So I solved two Debian problems I've had for a few weeks (the sound in my daughter's account and the Epiphany browser issue), one I've had for months (by discovering the touchpad settings app in Lenny), and was confronted with a new one (the new kernel's lack of a driver for my sound chip) and solved it by using a different kernel.

It's nice to get everything working right, but it's also nice to have everything working right.