Troubleshooting lynx - unable to connect to web

[openSauce]

Hi,

I included the Lynx package when I installed Fedora Core 7, but it can't browse webpages and gives unhelpful error messages.

When I type www.google.com into the search field (or any other URL, with or without an http:// prefix), it gives the message

Alert!: Unable to connect to remote host.

Similarly at the command line:

$ lynx -dump www.google.com

Looking up :8080
Unable to locate remote host :8080.
Alert!: Unable to connect to remote host.

lynx: Can't access startfile http://www.google.com/

I get the same message when I disable the Fedora firewall and SELinux.

I've had a look at the man page and searched the web, but can't find anything I could try to help diagnose the problem. Ping and Firefox can access google and other pages no problem. I've not touched the config files in /etc: lynx-site.cfg is empty apart from a comment line, and lynx.cfg is identical to the corresponding file on my laptop, on which lynx works correctly (laptop is running FC8). Can anyone suggest anything?

[glennzo]

That's pretty interesting. When I see a post asking a question about a program I'm not familiar with I'll often install the program just to see what its all about. I had no idea what Lynx is so I installed it with yum. Then I typed lynx www.google.com as regular user and Lynx opened Google in the terminal. I made absolutely no changes to any files on my system. Just installed Lynx and ran the command to load Google. This doesn't help you at all and I don't mean to waste your time, but it may tell you that there's something very basic that you're overlooking. Firewall maybe?

[openSauce]

Originally Posted by glennzo

Firewall maybe?

Already tried

Originally Posted by openSauce

I get the same message when I disable the Fedora firewall and SELinux.

I agree it's quite likely to be something external to lynx, since I too have left the lynx initial setup untouched (as far as I'm aware and am able to determine), but I'm at a loss as to what it could be. It doesn't seem to be anything related to my college's network, since if I boot a Fedora Live CD then lynx works (after installing via yum). So it's something on my main Fedora installation, but I can't find a way to get any info on what it is.

[openSauce]

Bump...

Never got to the bottom of this, maybe a fresh pair of eyes will have some suggestions