Firefox and Gentoo

[Charred_Phoenix]

I've been running Firefox on Gentoo for a while now with no trouble, but suddenly it started behaving oddly; it freezes as soong as I try to type something in the address bar. Same with normal Mozilla, rebuilding doesn't help. What could possibly be causing this?

[JohnT]

Have you upgraded anything associated with your video? XF86, video driver, change configs of your /etc/X11/XF86Config? Try launching either browser from the terminal and look for error messages.

[Charred_Phoenix]

Nope, haven't changed anything. No error messages either. If I let it start up slowly, there are no problems, but if I start typing while it's loading it will hang.

[Digit0]

Added any themes or plugins lately? try renaming your .mozilla dir o it goes default again and se if it still happens

[Charred_Phoenix]

Nope, haven't installed anything new. Getting rid of .mozilla didn't fix it.

[Hayl]

emerge it again and see if it clears up.

you may want to check ~/.phoenix or ~/.mozillafirebird in case it uses those directories _before_ you re-emerge.

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by Charred_Phoenix
If I let it start up slowly, there are no problems, but if I start typing while it's loading it will hang.

It ONLY hangs if you start typing while it's still loading? Let Firefox completely load then.

[Charred_Phoenix]

Hayl:
I've deleted .mozilla and .firefox, it doesn't help, neither does rebuilding.

Mdwatts:
Heh. That's the sort of thing you have to do on /windows/. You shouldn't have to walk around a problem in Linux.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my first post: This has only recently started happening, it used to work just fine.

Also, gaim crashes randomly on startup. I am becoming rather dissatisfied with Gentoo.

[Hayl]

Originally posted by Charred_Phoenix
Also, gaim crashes randomly on startup. I am becoming rather dissatisfied with Gentoo.

don't blame the distro, there are many people who run Gaim and Firefox and Gentoo with no problems at all.

what CFLAGS Are you using?

Gaim crashes quite often in its present state (probably under any distro) because the MSN and Yahoo support are both so buggy at the moment.

I have 3 Gentoo boxes and all of them are totally stable.

[Charred_Phoenix]

Hayl:

Well, I've never had any sort of problem with any other distro, but a week after installing Gentoo my system has become less stable than windows.

Gaim was compiled with CFLAGS="-O3 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer", so was firefox originally, but when it became unstable I recompiled it with -O2, didn't help though.

Never had any stability problems under SuSE.

[Hayl]

the user has complete control over how all the packages are compiled in Gentoo so... unfortunately only you can know what is wrong / making it unstable.

try recreating your home dir from scratch and see what happens.

or, if you don't think Gentoo works for you, go to a binary distro.

[Charred_Phoenix]

Yeah, that's true. Or at least it was before I told you how all of them were compiled /every/ package on my system was compiled that way except for firefox which was compiled with -O2. Deleted my entire home dir, ran firefox and it crashed.

[Charred_Phoenix]

OK, further investigation reveals that it freezes if I try to open the options panel or something too. I never get any error messages. I realise it's probably not the distro, but this is really frustrating.

[JohnT]

Have you tried a different build of Firefox or Moz?

[Hayl]

recompile it with -mcpu=i686 only and see what it does.

another thing to look at is its dependancies. maybe one of them is causing the crash.

>=dev-libs/libIDL-0.8.0
>=gnome-base/ORBit-0.5.10-r1
virtual/xft
>=sys-libs/zlib-1.1.4
>=media-libs/jpeg-6b
>=media-libs/libmng-1.0.0
>=media-libs/libpng-1.2.1
>=sys-apps/portage-2.0.36
dev-libs/expat
app-arch/zip
app-arch/unzip
gtk2? ( >=x11-libs/gtk+-2.1.1 )
!gtk2? ( =x11-libs/gtk+-1.2* )
java? ( virtual/jre )

also - keep in mind that firefox is a development browser so problems are to be expected with it.. i know that sounds lame but it is true.

PS: check out forums.gentoo.org and see if anyone else has reported anything. check out bugs.gentoo.org as well.

[asklepios]

WOW!!!!!!!
i can't believe that someone else in this world is having this problem too :eek:
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=124230
^earlier i posted this same problem and no it was not with gentoo alone. i even tried Debian and ArchLinux at that time and all three of them had the same problem. even pressing a caps lock or num lock key in address bar would hang the browsers.
now i have installed Gentoo again and suprisingly the problem is not there. i know you want a solution but i wanted to post that you are not alone.

[JohnT]

What browser plugins do you normally install? Post a list of ones you always have.

[bandwidth_pig]

I myself run firefox on Gentoo and have for a while now without a problem. I haven't read everything in the entire thread, so pardon me if you have already stated this, but did you emerge firefox? I myself did not. I instead downloaded it from mozilla.org. As previously pointed out, I'll bet firefox doesn't like some of your CFLAGs options. If you download the file from Mozilla I bet your problem goes away (since it's not in source).

[Charred_Phoenix]

recompile it with -mcpu=i686 only and see what it does.


Same problem.


WOW!!!!!!!
i can't believe that someone else in this world is having this problem too
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/show...threadid=124230
^earlier i posted this same problem and no it was not with gentoo alone. i even tried Debian and ArchLinux at that time and all three of them had the same problem. even pressing a caps lock or num lock key in address bar would hang the browsers.
now i have installed Gentoo again and suprisingly the problem is not there. i know you want a solution but i wanted to post that you are not alone.


Indeed, it seems to be something to do with the way it handles the kbd, because I can surf around with the mouse just fine, but if I type it will hang.


What browser plugins do you normally install? Post a list of ones you always have.
[/QUOTE[

None. And I think we've established that it's not a problem with plugins.

[QUOTE]
If you download the file from Mozilla I bet your problem goes away (since it's not in source).


Nope. Doesn't work.

I think I'm going to send a detailed bug report to the Mo' developers and see what they make of it, I've now encountered three people who have experienced this problem, and even on SuSE I remember sometimes it would stop responding to the KBD and I would have to shade, unshade.

[JohnT]

What browser plugins do you normally install? Post a list of ones you always have.


None. And I think we've established that it's not a problem with plugins.

No you were asked if you installed anything..."new"......not quite the same as what I asked.

[Charred_Phoenix]

No you were asked if you installed anything..."new"......not quite the same as what I asked.


That's not what I meant. Through other means I think we've established that it's something to do with the way Mo' handles the kbd. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

[bandwidth_pig]

If there is a problem with the way Mozilla handles the keyboard, then why do I not have any problem?

[JohnT]

Your problem is not with Mozilla, I think, if so it is only indirectly. Mozilla is only the end result that you are experiencing. Somewhere between your keyboard and the application you have a hardware/software problem. It could be related to anyone or a series of functions and calls on your particular box. All input to your screen goes through your video card, which may have its own issues with memory, RAMDAC etc;....then there is your /etc/11/XF86Config file with its own inherent quirks. We should mention also that sometimes windows can lose focus and have to be brought back into.......Cause and effect......we have a tendency to see the effect as the basis of causation and not seing the forest for the trees. Afterall you did say this has happened on three different distros, which I assume had three different installs of mozilla.

[CaptainPinko]

I hate to go off-topic but where do you find the course code to fire fox? I looked at the mozilla site and all I can find is the binary download of firefox (it's no good since it's a mactop running YDL) and the source for mozilla.