Three Monkeys, Three Typewriters, Two Days

December 6, 2005

Firefox support for Red Hat 8.0

Well, the system requirements page for Firefox claims to support my OS, but the 1.5 release crashes on startup just like the nightlies do. Quite unfortunate.

And before yet another wise-ass suggests that I should upgrade my OS, I must point out that I use this computer for actual work, which means that I can't just do OS upgrades willy-nilly, since they tend to make it unusable for a few weeks until I fix all the breakage from RedHat's update utility. That might be an option in summer 2006, but not till then.

Posted by bzbarsky at December 6, 2005 7:55 PM
Comments

Doesn't work on Ubuntu 5.10 either :(

Posted by: Nitin on December 6, 2005 8:06 PM

Pretty sure you just have to add the compat libstdc++ library or something like that. It worked for me :-)

- A

Posted by: Asa Dotzler on December 6, 2005 8:22 PM

Asa, you have to install the libstdc++ update to a vanilla RedHat 8 in order to get Firefox to even _try_ starting. Then if the update has been installed it tries to start and crashes. We've had a bug open on this since May or June, if you recall.

Posted by: Boris on December 6, 2005 8:52 PM

Asa: do you honestly think the user should have to do that?

Posted by: Nitin on December 6, 2005 11:01 PM

[quote]
Doesn't work on Ubuntu 5.10 either :(
[/quote]

Both 1.5 and the nightlies work fine here on Ubuntu 5.10, weird....

Posted by: Shadow3333 on December 7, 2005 1:03 AM

In case someone cares, the crash on startup that I get is: http://talkback-public.mozilla.org/talkback/fastfind.jsp?search=2&type=iid&id=12685115

Posted by: Boris on December 7, 2005 8:54 AM

Boris, I reopened bug 187029, which has same stacktrace:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=187029

Posted by: Adam Hauner on December 7, 2005 10:07 AM

Yeah, I saw that bug. Reopening it is probably pretty useless -- no one will ever work on it.

Posted by: Boris on December 7, 2005 10:20 AM

Somehow that rang a bell, because Firefox won't start on my work machine (SuSE 9.3), either, while SeaMonkey does.

Now that I looked at it again I see that it's a different problem, though: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=246313#c33

Posted by: Peter Weilbacher on December 7, 2005 11:43 AM

Try installing/upgrading just GTK+. If you don't want it to affect the rest of the system, compile the new GTK+ stack from the source then use LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

This is of course a huge pain in the butt but it'll let you find out if it's hitting a bug in an early GTK2 that was fixed in later versions (this has happened to me before).

Posted by: Mike Hearn on December 7, 2005 3:50 PM

Mike, I've tried just upgrading GTK; that really doesn't play nice with other things if I want to use an RPM -- too much stuff has GTK versions hardcoded into their dependencies... The /usr/local idea has the same problem -- RPM won't really let two separate GTK versions hang around, at least that I know of.

That said, my own builds (against GTK2 and all) work fine, both those I build on my own machine and the ones I build on the loaner Fedora Core 3 machine I have. So while this may be a bug in the GTK2 version I have, I'm having a lot of trouble hitting it _except_ with the Mozilla.org Firefox builds.

Posted by: Boris on December 7, 2005 7:02 PM
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