About a week or so ago, I started getting notifications in Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 that proclaimed: “Network error in weather”. I narrowed the source down to the Avant Window Navigator (AWN) weather applet. These notifications happened regularly on every update, whether automatic or manual. However, the weather data itself seemed to update correctly. This stumped me, so I went right to Google with the error. For a few days, I found others with the problem but no answers.
Then I found a helpful thread on the Ubuntu forums. It contained some helpful suggestions. One poster found how to modify the python script that actually called for the notification, so that commenting out that line prevented it from popping up. That would get rid of the notification, but not fix the underlying issue.
I suspected and others confirmed that changes on weather.com prevented the applet from finding something. That something turned out to be the weather map. I’ve seen this problem before in PDA weather programs when the data source either changed format or location. AWN being open source, the problem was quickly identified and a fix published.
This poster provided a link to the ultimate solution – the PPA that provided the updated version of AWN and its applets. Following the directions on this site, I uninstalled the general repository version of AWN, added the PPA to my repository list, and loaded the updated AWN packages. After restarting my system, the weather applet found the weather.com maps with no problem. Solved!
Many thanks to the AWN team for their quick fix and to Rasa1111 for pointing out the solution on the forum.
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