firefox & Mandriva help for newbie

[conticreative]

Hi, I am a very green Linux newbie, but otherwise I am a professional web developer, programmer and graphic artist and I have been a professional in the field for over 10 years./
I am saying this not to brag, but to give you an idea of my skill level.

I finally crowned my dream of having 4 computers working flawlessly on the same KVM. I purchased a Belking KVM and now I have a win XP pro box, a Mac OSX box, a Ubuntu Linux box (KDE) and a Mandriva box (Gnome) all on the same workstation.
Yesterday I was messing around with preferences and programs and one thing I wanted top do was to make my Firefox Installations as similar as possible across the 4 OS. That meant installing some of my favorite contributions such as the web developer plug-in.

Everything went fine, except that on my Mandriva box I am unable to launch Firefox any longer.

I installed the Plug-ins and then I closed Firefox, I restarted and for a few seconds I can see firefox on the lower task bar (whatever it's called) as if FF was going to start, but eventually the taskbar item disappears and Firefox has not launched.

I tried restarting the computer all together but it has had no effect on it. Basically I lost the use of FF and since I cannot open it I also cannot unistall the plug-ins that have broken my Firefox.

If I were on a Windows or Mac computer, I would be able to find the Firefox installation and try to remedy the issue or try to uninstall and re-install Firefox with a virgin installation. On Linux I have no idea on how to do this. I feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of OZ.

1) How could I try to quickly fix FF so it can start again?
2) How can I uninstall and re-install FF on my Mandriva box?
Your help would be greatly appreciated. If you know of a site or help file that compares basic tasks in Linux and Win OS (installation, file managment, etc.) so I can learn to use Linux better and not bother the group on a regular basis, please let me know. Thank you

CC

[daark.child]

Can you run firefox from the command line and post back the output (just enter the command "firefox" to run it).

[conticreative]

Hi thank you for the replay. I entered "Firefox" in the terminal and this is what returned:

/usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.3/run-mozilla.sh: line 131: 10526 Segmentation fault      "$prog" ${1+"$@"}

It means very little to me, but maybe it makes sense to you.

Thank you very much for the help.

[oz]

I don't know that this will work, but try renaming your hidden /home/username/.mozilla directory, then try a restart of firefox.

[conticreative]

By the way, I went to /usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.3/run-mozilla.sh

and the code around line 131 (starting at 130) is as follows:

moz_run_program()
{
	prog=$MOZ_PROGRAM
	##
	## Make sure the program is executable
	##
	if [ ! -x "$prog" ]
	then
		moz_bail "Cannot execute $prog."
	fi
	##
	## Use md5sum to crc a core file.  If md5sum is not found on the system,
	## then dont debug core files.
	##
	moz_test_binary /bin/type
	if [ $? -eq 1 ]
	then
		crc_prog=`type md5sum 2>/dev/null | awk '{print $3;}' 2>/dev/null | sed -e 's/\.$//'`
	else
		crc_prog=`which md5sum 2>/dev/null`
	fi
	if [ -x "$crc_prog" ]
	then
		DEBUG_CORE_FILES=1
	fi
	if [ "$DEBUG_CORE_FILES" ]
	then
		crc_old=
		if [ -f core ]
		then
			crc_old=`$crc_prog core | awk '{print $1;}' `
		fi
	fi
	##
	## Run the program
	##
	"$prog" ${1+"$@"}
	exitcode=$?
	if [ "$DEBUG_CORE_FILES" ]
	then
		if [ -f core ]
		then
			crc_new=`$crc_prog core | awk '{print $1;}' `
		fi
	fi
	if [ "$crc_old" != "$crc_new" ]
	then
		printf "\n\nOh no!  %s just dumped a core file.\n\n" $prog
		printf "Do you want to debug this ? "
		printf "You need a lot of memory for this, so watch out ? [y/n] "
		read ans
		if [ "$ans" = "y" ]
		then
			debugger=`moz_get_debugger`
			if [ -x "$debugger" ]
			then
				echo "$debugger $prog core"

				# See http://www.mozilla.org/unix/debugging-faq.html
				# For why LD_BIND_NOW is needed
				LD_BIND_NOW=1; export LD_BIND_NOW

				$debugger "$prog" core
			else
				echo "Could not find a debugger on your system."
			fi
		fi
	fi
}

Just in case this helps

[conticreative]

I don't know that this will work, but try renaming your hidden /home/username/.mozilla directory, then try a restart of firefox.

I a not sure what the hidden /home/username/.mozilla directory is or where the one I should rename is. I can only find /home/usr/ but there is no mozilla or firefox directory anywhere for me to rename.

Is it maybe a hidden filesystem I should know about but I don't?

[oz]

I'm not sure what file manager you might be using but if it's Nautilus (on Gnome), or Konqueror (on KDE), they offer a show hidden files option. You'll have to look around for the option in the file manager menu. Once you select the option, you should be able to see the .mozilla directory in /home/username/

[conticreative]

Scratch that. I found the "hidden" in "home", I renamed it .mozilla2 and sure enough I was able to launch it from the terminal.

Good job!

Now it appears that no plug ins are installed. So I am going to go ahead and install them one by one and see what happens. Is this a common bug (I know it's not a feature)?

[Giles]

Scratch that. I found the "hidden" in "home", I renamed it .mozilla2 and sure enough I was able to launch it from the terminal.

For neatness, it's probably worth deleting that old folder now - clearly the error was there, but firefox will have created a new, clean one to replace it.

Now it appears that no plug ins are installed. So I am going to go ahead and install them one by one and see what happens. Is this a common bug (I know it's not a feature)?

Yeah, the details about the installed plugins are kept in that folder you've moved, (as you may have guessed) so it's right that they should not be available now. Installing them one by one and finding out which one breaks it would be very useful, I guess. There's probably one that you're trying to use that isn't used by many people on linux/Gnome or something, and therefore no-one's noticed that it doesn't work happily.

As to whether it's a common bug, it seems that it's not a bug in firefox at all, but in a plugin. Certainly I haven't come across it myself, but then I don't know which plugins you were running (the one you mentioned, web developer, works fine for me in mandriva 2007, but I run blackbox, not gnome).

Giles