Eircom ipv6, linux, slow Firefox & Thunderbird

Have just installed Linux on another laptop (Fedora 9 on Lenovo Thinkpad T61).

It’s 10 times easier than it was to do a similar thing 4 years ago. Wireless card works, windows partitions are recognized, “yum” can pretty much install everything I need (even flash plugin for firefox).

One thing that – again – I had forgotten, having discovered it three years ago, is that – out of the box – Firefox and Thunderbird have ipv6 support switched on. Some might argue this is a good thing. I don’t know enough to comment. What I do know, though, is that for some reason, this causes an annoying delay of a few seconds when connecting to (respectively) websites and pop servers.

I don’t know enough to know whether this is a problem with Mozilla, Fedora, Eircom (our home ISP in Dublin), or my ADSL router. However, the solution is to disable ipv6 in both of these products.

In Firefox, navigate to “about:config”, and find the following property:

network.dns.disableIPv6

and set it to “true”.

In Thunderbird, go to “config editor” and amend the same property similarly.

Thunderbird: Moving email accounts out of “Local Folders”

I’ve just installed Thunderbird on a new laptop, and started configuring up my email accounts.

However, one email account, I mistakenly set to use the Global inbox in “Local Folders”.

This isn’t what I want – I want each email account to have its own Inbox/Sent/Draft/etc.

However, I can’t find a way to undo this in the Account Settings windows (or any where else in the user interface, for that matter).

STOP PRESS! Actually…I’ve found how you’re supposed to do it. It’s me who is stupid, not Thunderbird!

If you go to “Account Settings” and then click on “Server Settings” for the account in question, you can click on “Advanced”, which allows you to specify whether new mail should go into this account’s Inbox, a Global Inbox, or an Inbox for a different account.