Firefox lock file?

[Ray Parrish]

Ray Parrish wrote:
> NoOp wrote:
>   
>> >From the looks of that it appears that your home directory is pretty
>> messed up. After reading:
>>
>> man chown
>>
>> You may want to just change all ownership of everything in your *home*
>> directory after you are sure of the owner and group necessary to do so:
>>
>> Do:
>>
>> ls ~/ -l
>>
>> and note the user/group. For instance if I do:
>>
>> ls /home/aa (a user on my system)
>> the output will be something to the affect of:
>>
>> $ ls /home/aa -l
>> total 11076
>> -rw------- 1 bb abc 14114816 2008-12-07 15:28 core
>> -rw------- 1 bb abc 14217216 2008-12-01 15:39 core.12198
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bb abc     4096 2008-05-26 11:12 Desktop
>>
>> Where bb is the 'user' and 'abc' is the group that abc belongs to.
>>
>> So now, to change your home directory ownership to 'ray'
>>
>> sudo -i
>> chown -R ray:ray /home/ray
>>
>> The above assumes that your home directory is home/ray. If it is
>> something else then change accordingly - the command is:
>>
>> chown -R <owner>:<group> <file/directory>
>>
>> The above will change the ownership of all files in your home directory
>> with the exception of .gvfs. An easy way to look at the ownership of
>> your files via Nautilus is to add the 'Owner' column to your Nautilus
>> (Places|Home Folder): Edit|Preferences|List Columns| tick 'Owner'. Now
>> whenever you view your files/directories/folders via Nautilus you will
>> see who the owner is.
>>
>> Research it first, read 'man chown' etc., *and backup your home folder
>> first* - wait for awhile to see if someone comments on this post to
>> correct me (I've been known to be wrong in the past, but think I'm
>> pretty right on this one:-). Also be aware that some files in your
>> /home/<username> that may need root ownership (there should be *very
>> few*) will be affected changed as well. However, the ownership.txt file
>> can give you a place to go back you for those files if need be.
>>
>>
>>   
>>     
> Hello,
>
> Well, I've gotten a lot of sleep, and now that I feel better some, I'm 
> back to this. I ran the chown command on the .mozilla folder, and 
> Firefox still refuses to start. Also, every time I run Nautilus, then 
> exit it, I get notified that Nautilus has crashed, so I'm giving up, and 
> downloading the newest 8.04-2 iso and preparing to re-install Ubuntu.
>
> I'm having to use Seamonkey to get the download. It wouldn't create a 
> profile until I ran the chown command on the .mozilla folder, but now 
> has, so I can at least surf again.
>
> I evidently messed up my system too much to easily recover it. I have a 
> "Desktop" folder in the root folder which is empty and will not delete, 
> and several other oddities to the present file structure, and I'd just 
> like to start over and make sure everything is correct.
>
> Thanks for all the help. I've learned quite a bit more about the 
> wonderful command line in Linux from this.
>
> See you again after I get re-installed. 8-)
>
> Later, Ray Parrish
>
>   
Hello again,

Well, after turning about six or seven CD-Rs into worthless coasters, 
I'm not too sure I'll be re-installing after all. 8-) I did learn a lot 
about wodim, and I think that after several passes in -dummy mode, I may 
have actually gotten a usable Live CD burnt. I haven't tested it yet 
'though, but there were no error messages about IO problems this time 
around.

I've also spent a large amount of time running the grep command looking 
for the source of the "Firefox is already running" error message, and 
have eliminated it in a few places, namely places.sqlite in both my home 
and root folders. That still would not allow me to start Firefox! I 
searched in vain for a lock file somewhere in my file system and never 
found one.

However, I was running a root terminal window, and decided to see if I 
could start Firefox from there, to see any error messages it might be 
putting out, and it started! I quickly set all of the preferences, as it 
didn't have any of them set like I was using it for the first time, and 
also cleared the cache.

Firefox still would not start from the menu, so as a work around for 
now, I've added gksu to the command line of the menu entry, and now I'm 
able to start Firefox without the error message. I'm not real happy with 
running my browser in administrative mode however, so I may still go for 
the re-install of Ubuntu.

I wish I could figure out what is keeping the browser from starting in 
normal mode... I had to run grep on many individual parts of the file 
system, as I could not figure out how to use the  --directories=skip 
option with a regular expression, which would allow me to specify 
several folders to exclude at one time.

I tried to specify atoms as they call them in the man page by 
surrounding them with escaped or un-escaped parens, but each time I 
tried something different I got the wrong results. Here is one attempt I 
made -

 sudo grep -F "Firefox is already" -r -H --devices=skip 
--exclude-dir='\(/media\)' | '\(/proc\)' | '\(/home/ray/.wine\)' /

Hmmm... I just noticed that when I copied that in here, it was missing 
the backslashes on each of the second parens in each pair. I think I'll 
copy the corrected version back into Terminal and test it again. Nope, 
that did not work either, here's the error messages. I'm trying to start 
a recursive search from the root of the drive.

bash: \(/proc\): No such file or directory
bash: \(/home/ray/.wine\): No such file or directory

Can anyone show me how to properly formulate a series of atoms for the 
--exclude-dir option? I've tried just about every variation of syntax I 
can think of, placing the quote marks in different places, and without 
spaces between the pipe symbols, etc... but nothing has worked so far.

Later, Ray Parrish

-- 
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