How do I spawn browser windows from a service?

laredotornado · 04-28-2011, 10:39 AM

Hi,

I'm using Ubuntu 10.0.4. I'm running a background process on system startup (Selenium) that needs to launch browsers (e.g. Firefox, Google Chrome). What settings do I need to enable in order to do this? Currently, even if I SSH in as a user, I'm not able to launch a browser and get this error ...

Code:

selenium@selenium-chi:~$ /usr/bin/google-chrome 
No protocol specified

(chromium-browser:2156): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0.0

Anyway, thanks for any insights you can provide, - Dave

jefro · 04-28-2011, 12:59 PM

This is the problem. "cannot open display: :0.0"

You have to have some place for a gui to go.

May help you with this.
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/07/...ystem-startup/

arizonagroovejet · 04-28-2011, 01:23 PM

If you ssh in with X forwarding enabled, then you'll be to launch a browser or whatever GUI app you want to launch. The icon on your post indicates you were using a Mac at the time and the good news is that Mac OS X comes with an X windows implementation. So to run GUI applications over ssh you can just do

Code:

$ ssh -X user@host

arizonagroovejet · 04-28-2011, 01:25 PM

Oh hang on, is X11.app installed by default in Mac OS X these days? I can't remember. Look in Applications > Utilities and see if X11.app is there. If it's not, dig out the discs which came with your Mac or your Mac OS X installation disk and you should find X11.app on there somewhere. Unless you're using a really old version of Mac OS X, X11.app should launch automatically when you establish an ssh connection with X forwarding enabled.

laredotornado · 04-29-2011, 09:07 AM

A couple of clarifications. I'm posting from a Mac, but I'm using Ubuntu 10.0.4 installed on Intel x64 hardware.

The X-forwarding is valuable info, but ultimately, I want to be able to spawn browser windows from a service that I run on system startup. So, I'm not SSH'ing and launching the service, it is being run at system startup, courtesy of my script in /etc/init.d.

Given this, how do I give the service the ability to spawn browser windows? Thanks, - Dave

MTK358 · 04-29-2011, 09:23 AM

How about

Code:

/usr/bin/google-chrome -display :0

jefro · 04-29-2011, 12:05 PM

Permissions on script? Who is running the script?

arizonagroovejet · 04-29-2011, 12:12 PM

Are you trying to launch a web browser during boot, before a user has logged in?

You can do it by using a virtual X session which xvfb (if it's not installed it'll be in the repos).

Code:

$ xvfb :99 &
$ DISPLAY=:99 firefox

laredotornado · 04-29-2011, 12:34 PM

Hi,

For the permissions question, owner is root, but process is being run by a user (selenium) I created

Code:

selenium@selenium-chi:~$ ls -al /etc/init.d/selenium-server 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1142 2011-04-28 10:33 /etc/init.d/selenium-server

I spawn the process by running ...

Code:

su selenium -c 'java -jar /opt/selenium/selenium-server-standalone-2.0b3.jar -userExtensions /opt/selenium/user-extensions.js &>/dev/null &'

Arizonagroovejet, Selenium will attempt to launch a web browser before a user has logged in but after the boot up process has completed. I tried your suggestion, but was unable to launch xvfb ...

Code:

selenium@selenium-chi:~$ xvfb :99 &
[1] 1623
selenium@selenium-chi:~$ No command 'xvfb' found, did you mean:
 Command 'qvfb' from package 'qt4-dev-tools' (main)
 Command 'qvfb' from package 'qt3-dev-tools-embedded' (universe)
xvfb: command not found

[1]+  Exit 127                xvfb :99

Thanks for the continued help, - Dave

arizonagroovejet · 04-29-2011, 12:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by laredotornado

I tried your suggestion, but was unable to launch xvfb ...

Well it has to be installed before you can run it...

laredotornado · 04-29-2011, 01:34 PM

It's installed!

Code:

selenium@selenium-chi:~$ sudo apt-get install xvfb
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
xvfb is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 20 not upgraded.
selenium@selenium-chi:~$ 
selenium@selenium-chi:~$ xvfb :99 &
[1] 2607
selenium@selenium-chi:~$ No command 'xvfb' found, did you mean:
 Command 'qvfb' from package 'qt4-dev-tools' (main)
 Command 'qvfb' from package 'qt3-dev-tools-embedded' (universe)
xvfb: command not found

[1]+  Exit 127                xvfb :99
selenium@selenium-chi:~$

Further, I can't find an xvfb binary on my system. - Dave