# Root only one who can run MozillaFirebird.

## zooxk

Hello.

In my opinion MozillaFirebird is the best browser. And my favourable choice. My situtation is pretty f***ed and I hope I can get some assistance here, for I have tried the patience of many ircers on Freenode and ircnet. 

Well, when I am trying to open Firebird from my fluxbox menu (shortcuts), nothing happens. I try to open it from xterm and yet nothing happens. It's just happens when Firebird is in a good mood that it gives me error messages. On the other hand, when I do 

```
su - 

********

MozillaFirebird. 

```

Everything works. And that has been bothering me a lot. 

Here is one error message I get: 

 *Quote:*   

> Error launching browser window:TypeError:
> 
> Components.classes['@mozilla.org/appshell/component/browser/instance; 1'] has
> 
> no properties
> ...

 

Now, this aren't the all problems I get with browsers I have. Just recently mozilla has stopped sending stuff through forms when I press buttons that are equal to Submit. 

And another root-vs-user problem. Galeon is very smooth and shows all the fonts icelandic letters correctly when ran by root, but when user runs it, icelandic letters are way bigger than the others in the context. Here's screenshot of the diffrence between root and user run galeon (root being on the left side)  galeon.png 

I hope I get some useful answers here. I'm like | --- | this close to ironing my root partition and install gentoo (of course) again. 

P.S. and btw, please dont come with solutions like "Why dont you just su - and use the Firebird or Galeon as root" ... I  really want to solve this problem.

----------

## converter

This certainly sounds like a file ownership problem, doesn't it.

Try running firebird under strace so you can see where it's failing:

$ strace -f -e trace=file -o firebird.strace MozillaFirebird

The output should end up in firebird.strace (view it with vim or gvim if you want nice highlighting), and chances are you'll find at least one file I/O syscall failing because a file is owned by some other user, probably root.

Mozilla plugins that require installation by root often cause this problem because they leave chrome files owned by root with read permission disabled for group and other.

----------

## zooxk

Well, I did try to install a plugin, Mouse Gestures.

But where is the user chrome directory ? Is it in ~/.mozilla/ or does Firebird have it own ? What ownership / permissions ought to be on the chrome directory and everything in it ? 

Regarding the strace, the output file looks like readable ascii to me. Or  I dont understand a single word in that file, nor what to do with it or find the error.

----------

## Pete_Keller

I am experiencing the same problems, however I noticed another symptom, if I am running mozilla and try to start firebird, firebird will just exit without an error and a blank tab will open in the mozilla window.

I have run strace, and there are no permissions errors

Pete

----------

## fleed

Does this help at all?

----------

## converter

 *zooxk wrote:*   

> Well, I did try to install a plugin, Mouse Gestures.
> 
> But where is the user chrome directory ? Is it in ~/.mozilla/ or does Firebird have it own ? What ownership / permissions ought to be on the chrome directory and everything in it ?

 

Look at /usr/lib/MozillaFirebird

Extensions that cause ownership or permissions problems usually affect files in the chrome/ and components/ directories. You can use find to get a list of any files not owned by your uid and with permissions that prohibit reading by users other than owner:

```
# substitute your userid for "myuid"

cd /usr/lib/MozillaFirebird

find chrome components \! -user myuid -a \! -perm +4 -ls
```

If any files are listed, you can fix their modes manually, or paste the output in a reply here and someone will tell you what changes to make.

 *Quote:*   

> Regarding the strace, the output file looks like readable ascii to me. Or  I dont understand a single word in that file, nor what to do with it or find the error.

 

Look for open() calls that return -1 and set errno to EACCES. Example:

```
open("foobartest", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
```

----------

## STEALER.net

Well, this often happens when upgrading Firebird. One quick, but nasty solution for me was to remove the .firebird (or so, I don't remember it and I dont' have access to my system currently) directory in my home directory. After that, Firebird worked fine.

----------

## zooxk

[quote="converter"]

[code] # substitute your userid for "myuid"

cd /usr/lib/MozillaFirebird

find chrome components \! -user myuid -a \! -perm +4 -ls [/code]

[/quote]

Yeah I tried that. And well, I found some things. First of all, in the directory ' /usr/lib/MozillaFirebird/chrome/mozgest ' I found a couple of things that were not with correct permissions. So what I did was this 

[code] bash-2.05b# chmod -R 775 *

[/code]

So for future reference, this is the solution. If some admin could append the name if this thread with [Solved] or something. At least I can now open MozillaFirebird from my menu.  

Thanks converter.

----------

## radr

sudo rm -rf ~/your-user/.mozilla

this fixed the problem for me,   i guess i shouldve been su/root

when i installed it....

i used sudo to emerge mozilla, i didnt know that would not play nice.

but heck i learned something new 

gentoo kicks bungholio!~    :Laughing: 

----------

## eGore911

Had the same problem, recompiled with:

```

USE="-java" emerge mozilla-firebird-cvs

```

works for me

----------

## converter

 *eGore911 wrote:*   

> Had the same problem, recompiled with:
> 
> ```
> 
> USE="-java" emerge mozilla-firebird-cvs
> ...

 

That is a solution, but not a very efficient one, since fixing the ownership issues takes only a few seconds. You'll run into this every time you install an extension that requires you to run as uid 0.

For what it's worth, when I install this type of extension, I just make myself owner of the chrome/ and components/ directories, and after the install and quitting/restarting the browser to allow for the file updates that have to take place, fix any permissions that would prevent users from reading files and then change ownership back to root. This seems a little safer to me -- as much as I trust mozilla, I don't like running a browser as root, period.

----------

