Firefox and Wine silently fail to open

Yarin · 07-30-2009, 01:36 PM

Firefox 3.1 beta 3 won't load. When I open the application, the little bouncy icon bounces, and the task manager shows "Firefox Web Browser", but this only stays this way for about 15 seconds then just goes away. No error or anything.

I've had this identical problem when I try to open certain programs with Wine too. Is there some place I can find a detailed error report on these failures?

karamarisan · 07-30-2009, 01:38 PM

Try running them from a terminal.

Yarin · 07-30-2009, 11:13 PM

Yup, that's it.
Don't know why I didn't think of it. !!

karamarisan · 07-30-2009, 11:43 PM

It's a good solution, but, unfortunately, doesn't always work. Some newer software is written without regard for that convention of *nix software, sort of like how some software these days doesn't include a manpage or a --help option. How are we supposed to figure out how to run that crap?

gankoji · 07-31-2009, 01:12 AM

@karamarisan:

Sometimes it may be that the devs have simply decided to not clutter STDOUT with errors and send them all to STDERR. a simple ./program 2> /home/user/logfile might give you what you're looking for if you run into that.

Cheers :-)

karamarisan · 07-31-2009, 02:24 AM

Ah, true, but I know the difference between the two - I didn't say anything about using redirection to check output.

I really do see a trend of software ignoring these important parts of running on a *nix system. Just me being a young old fart, I suppose.

gankoji · 07-31-2009, 10:36 AM

yes, I can't say I'm oblivious to these trends either. Just trying to be helpful, that's all :-).

jschiwal · 07-31-2009, 10:40 AM

You can use ltrace or strace. Look at the output beginning from the end, and see if you can see where the error occurred.