I have a fresh install of SuSE-11.1 (32-bit) on an ASUS P3-Series Barebone (P3-P5G31) with kernel 2.6.27.21-0.1-pae. CPU is Intel Core2 Duo E7200 @ 2.53 GHz.
Please note that after the initial install I did the updates, including the latest kernel.
While all other things are running well and appear to be stable (except sound, I’ve still to work on this) seamonkey is crashing. It will browse simple websites, but e.g. the openSUSE startpage is showing for a split second and then the window is gone.
Clicking on Help > About Plug_Ins will close the window immediately. It behaves like this button is labeled “Exit / close Window” :’(
Seamonkey has never be a problem before. It’s ok on another system with 11.1 (but with the original kernel 2.6.27.7-9-pae).
Where should I start to look to debug this? Are there any logfiles written somewhere, when seamonkey crashes? How can I possibly downgrade the kernel?
The code snippet from the wrapper script where it fails is:
# if there's no command line argument and there's not a running
# instance then just fire up a new copy of the browser
if -z "$1" ]; then
$AOSS $MOZ_PROGRAM $MOZ_LANG
bail $?
fi
It will display the profile directory it uses. (Most probably .mozilla). Rename that directory and run it again. A bad plug-in may be causing some issues.
~> export LANG="en_US"; export MOZ_DEBUG=1; seamonkey
DEBUG:
MOZ_APPNAME=seamonkey
MOZ_PROFILE=.mozilla
MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/seamonkey
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/seamonkey/plugins:/usr/lib/seamonkey:/usr/lib/mpi/gcc/openmpi/lib
DISPLAY=:0.0
FONTCONFIG_PATH=
MOZ_LANG=
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details- 1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details- 1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
A similar error occurs when I try to start gconf-editor
Ok, renamed directory .mozilla to .mozilla-original and tried again; same result.
In the seamonkey release notes I read:
Note: You must run SeaMonkey at least once to complete autoregistration and
for the compreg.dat file to be written to the installation directory. If a
different user (other than the person who installed the product) runs the
program first, a core dump will occur. (Bug 49345)
Not sure. I installed seamonkey after I read your post only. But, I didn’t face with any issues. The installation was done with root login (I don’t think you can install it with a logged in user unless you compile it yourself). Mine is 64bit version.
Also, I updated to the latest version - 1.1.14.
I solved this issue the brute force way. This means that I did format my harddisk and made a fresh install of 11.1. This time I did not do the updates. Result: seamonkey works as expected and the gconf error went away. I strongly suspect that the latter was the reason for seamonkey to fail.
Many thanks to syampillai who helped me to find the reason why it failed.
Generally, I never do “upgrades”. I rather do a fresh install only. I always keep my “home” in a separate partition and DO NOT format that when I install a new Linux version. This way all my data are kept intact across version changes. The only things we need to take care are some configuration files I manually maintain. I have a few of them like my mobile connectivity details etc. Also, make sure that if you use any databases, dump it and keep it so that you can restore it for the new database server version. (Invariably, new installs bring in new RDBMS versions too).
After a successfully installation to a new openSUSE version, I also go a step further, and limit my repositories to OSS, Non-OSS, Update and Packman. If I need an application that is on another repository, then I will very briefly add the other repository, install the application, and then remove the other repository. This is very easy to do from the command line with:
zypper ar some-url some-repos-name
zypper install some-application
zppper rr some-repos-name
for example, to install the chess game crafty from the education repository for openSUSE-11.1:
zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Education/openSUSE_11.1/ education
zypper install crafty
zypper rr education
One can easily copy and paste the URL from one’s browser into the command line, avoiding the risk of typing the URL wrong.