Firefox only works for root

[lionel47]

Hi all,

I did an apt-get update last night and everything went fine except for Firefox. I can't launch it as a user from KDE or any other environment. However, I can launch it as rott from any of the same environments. I googled and checked this forum for an answer but couldn't find one. Can anyone help? :?

[arkaine23]

How do you try to launch it?

ls -al /usr/bin/firefox

are there 3 x's in the permission bits?

[lionel47]

The permission bits read as -rwxr-xr-x

So, I think they are right. Any suggestions? Thanks.

[mightydavefish]

Go to a terminal as a user and run firefox from there. What does it say in the terminal for an error?

[lionel47]

It says:


selected locale: en-US

And then goes back to the prompt. Hope this helps. Thanks.

[Sir_Stinksalot]

I have this same problem can someone please help!
firebird however works fine

[DuckDodgers]

This was in the readme from the firefox 0.9.1 download.

Note: If you install in the default directory (which is
usually /usr/local/mozilla), or any other directory where
only the root user normally has write-access, you must
start Mozilla first as root before other users can start
the program. Doing so generates a set of files required
for later use by other users.

[gradnite]

This was in the readme from the firefox 0.9.1 download.

Note: If you install in the default directory (which is
usually /usr/local/mozilla), or any other directory where
only the root user normally has write-access, you must
start Mozilla first as root before other users can start
the program. Doing so generates a set of files required
for later use by other users.

I wish I could get firefox, but I haven't figured out apt yet, and on the list of everything in the apt I didn't see firefox listed. I'm too confused. :)

I did finally manage to un-install a couple things via apt.

[mzilikazi]

Debian installs Firefox to an unwritable directory. You can't add extensions to FF w/out write permissions. You could get the installer from http://mozilla.org/ which is how I prefer to install FF.


wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.9.1/firefox-0.9.1-i686-linux-gtk2+xft-installer.tar.gz
tar xzvf firefox-0.9.1-i686-linux-gtk2+xft-installer.tar.gz
cd firefox-installer/
./firefox-installer

This sets up firefox in ~ (/home/username). You can easily add extensions, themes etc. w/out worrying about root permissions. To run it do:


~/firefox-installer/firefox-bin

You can create a script to launch it for you:

touch firefox.sh
echo "/home/username/firefox-installer/firefox-bin" > firefox.sh
chmod +x firefox.sh
sudo mv firefox.sh /usr/bin

Now just create a luancher on your desktop or taskbar to run your new script by executing:
firefox.sh

[probono]

klik://firefox (klik client must be installed) automates that for you.

[avitygrai]

The new Firefox (0.9.3) creates its user configuration files in ~/.mozilla/firefox. I had the same problem on a SuSE distro (I had run the installation with sudo by habit) and it set the user and group ownerships to root.

Look in your home directory for a hidden folder named .mozilla with #>ls -al

If it's there, then switch to root and type the following:

#>chown -R username .mozilla

#>chgrp -R users .mozilla

...now when I start Firefox, I get:
(QFA)Talkback error: Can't initialize.

but firefox starts right up without a problem.

hth,
grav