Of cousre my first error was to try to do something productive on a current ubuntu, but since they have again broken the canonical way to configure protocol handlers, 90% of all howtos describing how to configure org-protocol plain don't work on ubuntu 11.10. gconftool does no longer work, setting things in about:config in firefox has no effect, the current season's incantantion is to put
[Desktop Entry] Name=org-protocol Exec=emacsclient %U Type=Application Terminal=false Categories=System; MimeType=x-scheme-handler/org-protocol; into ~/.local/share/applications/org-protocol.desktop and then run update-desktop-database .local/share/applications/ , as mentioned before: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/41733 More serious is the problen that firefox 7.0.1 steadfastly refuses to set location.href to the URIs required by org-protocol, it throws rather scary looking exceptions if the result of encodeURIComponent(location.href) in the URI does not appear after a question mark. I sort of got it working by changing the URI to "org-protocol://capture://?x="+encodeURIComponent(l)+"/"+... and then added the same three characters in org-protocol-check-filename-for-protocol: (regexp-quote (plist-get (cdr prolist) :protocol)) ":/+\\(\\?x=\\)?"))) - Florian.