Weather applets “retrieval failed” in both 14.04 and 16.04…they were working fine Yesterday morning (Tuesday), now I have no functioning weather applets
#Note
Libmateweather fix is released for Trusty 14.04 and Xenial 16.04.
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They’ve stopped working for me too (both the clock applet and weather applet) – 2 computers on 16.04 (MATE 1.14).
I can only guess the service is unavailable?
No weather displayed here either: 1 laptop 16.04.1 MATE 1.14, United States, Virginia
Well this isn’t good. I did a little investigating and used Wireshark to get the address it attempts. A browser gets a big “This Service is no longer available” from weather.noaa.gov.
Here’s my link for SE Michigan USA:
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/forecasts/zone/mi/miz076.txt
But even http://weather.noaa.gov displays the same message.
A quick browse of the noaa.gov site indicates it also has trouble looking things up but I did find a not-so-plaintext version navigating a bit under forecast.noaa.gov. It may be a matter of finding the right URLs.
I know from selecting locations all over the globe it seems broken everywhere but I’m not sure if this is a USA or North America only problem.
Additional info: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/dm-cgi-bin/chgshow.pl?fn=DM051602.txt
Looks like they were late in killing this service.
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The location is hard coded in libmateweather.so, source weather-iwin.c:
url = g_strdup_printf ("http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/forecasts/zone/%s/%s.txt", state, zone);
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So we need a work-around for this issue…The weather applets are the main reason I switched to Ubuntu-Mate. I can convert Ubuntu Unity to Gnome Classic without difficulty but the weather applets were disabled in 14.04…this is a serious issue
Looks like the GNOME Weather app used this service too:
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And this
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All I can say is…
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LMAO! That clip pretty much sums up my reaction…
Ok, so the cause is known. I don’t know what to do with this information. Is there going to be a fix in the next update?
I don’t know, but hopefully a new version of libmateweather will be pushed to both 16.04 and 14.04.
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FYI, this is from the MATE dev channel:
<monsta> hi all
<monsta> if anyone has issues with weather applet today, that's because server is shut down
<monsta> I'm testing another one
<monsta> https://github.com/mate-desktop/libmateweather/commit/835055e0d0b950d3f66ad236de7e40942f6f7d8e
<monsta> ^^^
<monsta> well, that one seems to work fine, tested it for a few hours
<monsta> time for another 1.14.x release I guess :)
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I’m not sure a METAR replacement is relevant or not. It’s definitely for pilots. This commit may be moot for MateWeather (anyone?).
But I do know one thing. That weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/forecasts/zone/%s/%s.txt URL isn’t all that’s needed. There must be another for “Current Conditions”. Thanks to Google CACHED I was able to see this data wasn’t there.
Not to mention a replacement will probably not be format compatible and new parsing needed.
The new url, aviationweather.gov, seems to work fine with the existing parser.
I recompiled libmateweather.so.1.6.9 with 12.04 (Linux Mint Mate13 64-bit):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4-etbLombpLdWJsOXljOXU3VUU/view?usp=sharing
For Linux Mint Mate 13 users who don’t want to wait for an official update, just replace the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmateweather.so.1.6.9 file. Be sure to make a backup first.
For those who concern the security issue using this patched file or use other Linux distributions, please compile libmateweather.so.1.6.9 from here:
You may use ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-shared, then “make” and “sudo make install”. It will install libmateweather.* to /usr/lib/. Just move /usr/lib/libmateweather.so.1.6.9 to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ and delete the rest /usr/lib/libmateweather.*
Good luck.
Now I’m happy with my Mate desktop again 
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libmateweather 1.14.1 was released last night, here is the commit that fixes the issue:
I’ll start updating Debian and Ubuntu today.
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Here is the Launchpad bug where this is being handled:
Hi,
I’ve done the update but now I can’t see the clock, and worse, I can’t add it again to the panel. I’ve rebooted several times but still the same.
Kind regards!! 
Well, It apparently fixes another issue. Most of Africa, South America and great parts of Asia were simply not supported by the former provider. It seems that AWC supports all these regions.
Can it be that I will finally be able to use the Weather Applet?