I am running Fedora 3 on several computers and have been using Firefox for some time, most recently version 1.0.7. After a long time without problem, a problem has developed suddenly on one computer that has me stumped. I can run firefox as root, but not as an ordinary user. I get a message about a bus error and a reference to line 159 of run-mozilla.sh. Frankly, I'm not even sure how to diagnose the error from here, because I don't have the foggiest idea what kind of a problem I'm dealing with. I assume that it's probably something that I've changed on the computer recently, but nothing really comes to mind. Can someone enlighten me a bit?

Welcome to LQ.

Not without the error. Is it a Fedora packaged version or a mozilla packaged version?

It's a Fedora packaged version, and the specific error message that I get is:

run-mozilla.sh: line 159: 23319 Bus error "$prog" ${1+"$@"}


The number after "line 159: changes every time I try to run firefox, but the rest of the message doesn't. I've tried to run firefox as a normal user in two ways. First, I just type firefox from the command line. The result is no response at all. Second, I add the path, /usr/lib/firefox-1.0.7/firefox, and I get the above message. When I run firefox as root user, it runs normally whichever version of the command I use.

As I mentioned before, this is a new development, and this version of firefox had worked before sometime last week. As I normally keep the machine running and firefox open, I'm not sure how long ago things might have changed. It just wouldn't restart for a normal user one day when I rebooted the machine.

Firefox (Linux) fails to start

If you used sudo to install Firefox and it starts at the end of the install process, runs when you log in as root but fails to run for the user you were sudo'ing the install from, then check the ownership of $HOME/.mozilla and subdirs. You won't get any error messages and Firefox will exit with value 1. The ownership of $HOME/.mozilla and subdirs may be set to root:root and you will need to 'chown -R <username>:<usergroup> $HOME/.mozilla' to get Firefox to work. (Firefox 1.0.7).

Darn! That idea sounded right on the money. I made sure that the directories and files were the right owner and group. Unfortunately, my problem persists. One other interesting point that I hadn't thought to mention before is that I found that if I start firefox as root, I can start another instance as a normal user. However, if I haven't started it as root first, I can't start it as a normal user.