I'm setting up a SuSE 9.0 Linux box for my brother and his kids and have run across a problem I haven't encountered before. I downloaded and installed the latest version of firefox into /usr/lib/firefox. I've set up 5 accounts in addition to root. In two of the accounts I've been successful in creating an application link to firefox. It runs fine in those two accounts. All of the accounts are in the same group. In a third account, I can create the application link. However when I attempt to run firefox, it starts to launch, showing up on the panel...then it just goes away. I've checked the permissions on the executable in /usr/lib/firefox and everyone has read and execute priviliges. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Open up a terminal and run it from there.. it should output any errors it gets in the terminal window. If that doesn't work.. use strace to trace where the problem is.

running firefox from a terminal results in the following:

Xlib: connection to ':0.0' refused by server
Xlib: XDM authorization key matches an existing client!

a little googling found the following:

>I got the same message, so I typed [xhost +] to turn off access control run
>firefox then [xhost -] to turn access control back on.

seems to be an obscure X authentication error that's popped up with firefox 9.x running on SuSE 9.0 - 9.1
I'll give it a try and report back.

Are you trying to run firefox as one user when logged into X as another? If so, logout and login as that user your attempting to run it as, should clear up the problem. By default, X only allows the user logged in to start X applications.

>Are you trying to run firefox as one user when logged into X as another? If so, logout and login as that user your >attempting to run it as, should clear up the problem. By default, X only allows the user logged in to start X >applications.

No, I was only attempting to run firefox from /usr/lib/firefox while only logged into the new accounts, one at a time. xhost +, run firefox, exit firefox, xhost - did the trick for me. I've never come across this error before. I was going to check mozilla.org to see if anything had been mentioned. This only seems to happen with firefox 9.x and SuSE 9.0/9.1 from what I've found so far. Hope this was able to help someone else out. Thanks!

Well either way.. your trying to run Firefox as another user but logged in as a different user running it.. that's why you'll get that error.

I originally installed firefox as root and first ran it from root. How can I install firefox to one location and let multiple users run it without any problems? What would be the correct way to do this?

Well, if you install it in /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin and make it executable by all.. anyone can run it when they login to the machine under their own profile.