firefox does not start

[Roy Smith]

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Ray Parrish wrote:
> Lucio M Nicolosi wrote:
>> On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 1:12 AM, Sandy Harris <sandyinchina at gmail.com>
wrote:
>>  
>>> Newly installed system, 8.10 64-bit on Core 2 duo box.
>>> Busy adding software, doing updates, etc.
>>>
>>> Firefox worked for a while, then got to a state where
>>> if I try to start it, it always says another firefox is
>>> running and I must kill that or restart the computer.
>>>
>>> I've tried restatrting and done "ps ax | grep fire",
>>> "ps ax | grep moz" and "ps ax | more" looking
>>> for processes to kill. No joy.
>>>
>>> Presmably there's a lock file somewhere that
>>> causes this, but I find nothing under /var/lock
>>> or var/run.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Sandy Harris,
>>> Quanzhou, Fujian, China
>>>
>>> --
>>> ubuntu-users mailing list
>>> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
>>> Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
>>>
>>>    
>> Perhaps you could try the graphical alternative:
>>
>> System - Administration - System Monitor - Processes
>>
>> Look for Firefox and kill it.
>>  
> Hello,
>
> I usually use "ps -C firefox" to discover the PID of a zombie, but it
> may not be in memory at all. I recently had the same problem, and the
> fix for me turned out to be renaming the Firefox profile folder, so that
> Firefox had to begin a new one on startup. Something in the old profile
> was telling Firefox it had already started, so it kept balking on me
> until I renamed the profile folder, and began a new profile.
>
> I still haven't discovered what it was in the old profile folder that
> was causing the problem, but I still have it, so maybe some day I'll be
> able to find out what it was exactly. Jere's the location of the Firefox
> profile folder.
>
> /home/username/.mozilla/firefox/sl4dj5fs.default
>
> Yours of course will have your actual user name in place of the
> "username" that appears in that path string. Rename the last folder on
> the path, by changing the .default extension to .backup and you should
> then be able to start Firefox again.
>
> Later, Ray Parrish
>
Just an added note here, the default profile directory name is a
series of random characters followed by the .default.  So the actual
directory name on her machine will be different.  Another thing that
can cause this behavior is the presence of a .parentlock file in the
user's profile folder.  When Firefox is started it creates this file
to let any other instance of Firefox know that this profile is in use,
and the file is automatically deleted when you exit Firefox.

I found that out the hard way when I was using Windows.  One day I was
browsing the internet with Firefox, and a few minutes later my backup
software started up to make a differential backup of my drive.  It saw
the .parentlock file in my profile directory and being the good little
program it was, it added it to the backup file.  Later when having to
do a restore from that same backup set, after the restore was
completed I couldn't get Firefox to start.  So I had to remedy that
problem by adding the .parentlock file to the list of files to ignore
in the backup software.

- --

Roy Smith
Ubuntu 8.10 - Intrepid Ibex
GnuPG public key fingerprint : CC57 2F8C 2BF5 903D 168D 9391 714F 5741
39D2 5D62

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