Cannot open Firefox after closing her.

[Dotan Cohen]

On 08/03/07, oldman <talbotscott at cox.net> wrote:
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> Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > Recently, I've found that I'm unable to open Firefox after I close the
> > program. I close Firefox with the X button on the Title bar. When I
> > try to open it again, I am confronted with this:
> > Firefox is already running, but not responding. To open a new window,
> > you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your
> > system.
> >
> > I've looked in /.mozilla/firefox/profile but there is no lock file.
> > Also, typing jobs at the command line shows me no jobs- not even
> > things that I know are running such as Opera and Kmail.
> >
> > This problem is reproducable: I reboot, and I can open Firefox.
> > However, after close, it will not reopen. How can I kill Fx so that I
> > can restart it, without shutting down?
> >
> > Dotan Cohen
>
> Not sure this will help, but I've found that FF and Thunderbird as well
> will display this same error if it cannot read the <home> directory
> (that's not your home but the directory that the program calls home (or
> possibly it is just 1 of the files within that directory).  I keep a
> separate directory so that I have the same environment in Rawhide, FC6,
> FC5, and ubuntu and invariably I'll start up the mail program without
> having mounted the partition this directory is on and I get that error.

No reason why it wouldn't be able to read that directory. It's a
normal directory in /home/user/.mozilla/firefox and I don't use
ThunderChicken or run any other OSes or instances of this user.

> How does this help you? well... try doing an ls -lah
> ~/.mozilla/firefox/%$your.default Directory while you can't start
> firefox look for altered ownership of files/directories and permissions
> (although I can't imagine why these would be changed by firefox)  Are
> you accessing from different account? perhaps there is a default
> user/group that is being reset if you are logging from a different user
> / group or distro perhaps a changed uid referring back to your previous
> problem having copied you kubuntu /home dir?

Good thinking, but that was on another machine. Kubuntu was on the
desktop, but this lappy has only ever seen Fedora. Well, it saw XP up
until the EULA screen :) I've a nice picture of myself clicking NO!

> good hunting!

Dotan Cohen

http://essentialinux.com/linux-software.php
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