I’m running OpenSuse 11 (GNOME) with Firefox 3.
I can’t start Firefox because it says another instance is running… when I look at the processes via the gui it shows 2 Firefox processes that are zombies. I’ve rebooted to no avail and I searched to see what to do, and all I’ve come up with was to kill the parent process - but I don’t know what that is (I just switched and am still a linux newb).
Any help getting rid of these would be apreciated!
You don’t need to find the “parent process”, you can simply open a terminal, then type:
su -
killall -9 firefox-bin
Which will completely murder all processes named firefox-bin - ruthlessly.
Thanks for the quick reply.
I tried what you said and it didn’t seem to work. The command produced no output and the 2 processes are still there and I still can’t open firefox. Is there anything else I could try?
A zombie process can’t be killed, you were correct in targeting the parent. But hasn’t any effect neither, it just consumes a process identificator.
So there is something else causing your Firefox to no start. Probably configuration… try with “mv ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla_backup”.
ahh thanks for the tip, i just assumed it had something to do with the zombies - didn’t even think of my profile.
I actually had my profile set to use the profile on my windows installation and apparently something funny happened the last time I shut down Windows. All it took was a boot into Windows (which I try to avoid doing as much as possible :D) and it was fixed.
Thanks