On Sun, 30 May 2004 17:44:19 -0700 (PDT), Frank Rehwinkel wrote:
But it won't start. The symptom, when typing firefox in a shell, is that after a few seconds, it ends. Nothing writen to stdout or stderr. Nothing pops up. No new process created. If I try to start it from the gnome panel, a see a "Starting Web browser" window being created, but after a few seconds it disappears.
I've uninstalled firefox, and reinstalled it, to no avail. I searched for a ~/.firefox directory. One didn't exist. I've moved the ~/.mozilla directory out of the way and the ~/.phoenix directory out of the way, still no good. I uninstalled firefox again, and moved the /usr/lib/firefox directory out of the way. And reinstalled firefox. Still no good. I moved /usr/lib/mozilla out of the way, and still firefox just returns immediately.
I have not tried rebooting, but as this isn't Windows, I wouldn't expect that to help.
Well, if lock files are involved and you can't seem to track them down, rebooting is a quick way to fix that.
Just to add an additional test, have you tried starting firefox in a fresh user account?
If that doesn't work either, repeat your removal/reinstallation attempts. But before doing so, enter run-level 1 and make sure you really kill any firefox processes and remove /usr/lib/firefox* before you re-install something. [Yes, I saw that you had tried that already, try again ;)]. Also try removing everything from /tmp, which might be a source of errors.
I encountered a similar while reviewing firefox 0.8 packages recently. At one point the only way I could reproduce the symptom was when I forgot to remove /usr/lib/firefox prior to upgrading firefox.