firefox fixed!

i recently noticed i had never bothered uninstalling some of the default things that come with openSUSE 11. there were  things i had installed that i never ended up using or didn't end up being what i wanted. well, a few days ago i decided to try removing some of these extras, and somehow i ended up breaking firefox. it would not load.

in opensuse, the mouse cursor changes with a little mini icon bouncing up and down to indicate that a program is loading. i would see the firefox logo bouncing, but shortly afterwards it would just close without saying anything. since my flock browser was unaffected, i wasn't worried about it much. soon afterwards though, i noticed vlc (a media player) was not loading as well. this could not be!

after a bit of investigation, here is the story of the fix...

since i was not getting an error, i decided to google "firefox not loading opensuse" to see if there was any help. i did not find direct help, however i did find a user having the exact same symptoms with ubuntu linux. ubuntu and opensuse do things a little different, however i noticed that one of the suggestions was to try loading firefox from the terminal. the terminal is a command line text interface... and anyway most programs can be started from terminal simply by typing the name of the program. so, i opened up a terminal and typed in "firefox". i was met with the following message:

Could not find compatible GRE between version 1.9.0.5 and 1.9.0.5.

so, i googled this message and found that it means something was wrong with a software that firefox (and apparently vlc) use to run. well, i went to the software administration in opensuse and searched for this troubled software. running a search for "mozilla" in the software administration pointed me to the software giving problems - in my case it was called mozilla-xulrunner190. but what is this? it was already installed and already the right version.... or was it?

after many attempts of removing and adding and pulling my hair out, i stumbled upon the problem and solution. while true that the software was the right one, it was installing a version not meant for my computer. i simply highlighted the xulrunner program, clicked on the "versions" tab, and changed it to the version for my machine. (version 1.9.0.5-.1.x86_64 not 1.9.0.3-.1.i586).

as soon as i changed the version, opensuse pointed out that one of the programs i had removed was now required to be instaled again. who would have thought that taking out a spell check tool would have such a crazy effect? somehow by removing and adding that tool...the other software switched and made a mess.

well, immediately after the changes were applied, i clicked on the firefox launcher and to my delight, everything was exactly as it was the last time i loaded firefox. my browsing history, my previously open tabs...everything! vlc is now working normal too.

and so its the continuous love-hate with linux. i don't know it well enough to prevent myself from messups like this, BUT the help is out there (and its really awesome that you don't have to restart for every little thing).

i'm glad to have my firefox back :o)