I'm really losing it now...

I have installed RH 9 (from RH 8), fresh install. I knew it was going to come with a dated version of Mozilla so I chose not to install Mozilla at all ( I use firebird anyway). Firebird 0.7 doesn't seem to require installation (just unpacking the tarball), so I tried to run it from the /root dirctory on my RH 8 partition.

This is where the things get very very odd - firebird would sometimes work flawlessly, and sometimes it would try load the homepage, I would press ESC to stop it, and then it would just freeze, usuallt when I want to enter an URL in the address bar. When it freezes, even the window stops respondng, I have to kill the actuall process. Strange, cos I NEVER had any problems with firebird in RH 8.

Then I thought that maybe cos I didn't install Mozilla, some of the dependancies are broken. I used APT4RPM to install Mozilla (1.2.1) which obviously fetched all the deps. Just to make sure I downloaded a fresh tarball of firebird, and unpacked that into /root of my RH 9 partititon (the one where the OS itself resides). Still the same thing. I then downloaded Mozilla 1.5, and installed it (in /usr/local/mozilla) and still the same thing happens. I said above that sometimes it works, but that's maybe 1 in every 50 times I try it. I am writing this using the Mozilla 1.2.1 I installed via apt, but just for the record I did try removing 1.2.1. before installing 1.5 cos I did hear somewhere that sometimes they don't coexist well together.

I even tried setting the homepage to blank, so that I wouldn't have to press escape, and in that case it freezes the moment I try to type in the address bar. EXACTLY the same thing happens in Moz 1.5 and firebird.

What gives, I really want to have firebird back!!!

Well, I really don't know how to help you. I just installed Mozilla 1.5 over the weekend and had no problems at all. It was the easiest upgrade I've ever done so far. It's very easy to remove an older version of Mozilla because you have to install 1.5 into a completely different directory.

Umm...not really the kind of answer I was hoping for. Yes, in my past experience installing moz and fb is rather straightforward, however obviously something is borked here. I don't like a couple of other things in RH 9 either, so maybe I'll just have to try another distro if no-one can help me sort this out.

You don't need to install Mozilla to get Firebird working. Have you tried a clean profile? Rename the .phoenix folder under your home directory (delete the dot) and then restart Firebird. If it works OK you can (if you want) copy bookmarks.html from your old profile into the new one.

Yep I tried that, no difference. I know that Mozilla is not neccesary to run firebird, but I am really at the end of my tether and I'll try anything....I still can't get it to work.

ummmmmmmm I did that rm -rf /bin/laden thing and what happened? somethign bad? does it matter? Help

I think you are beyond help mate

Cheers

BTW something was seriously buggered in that RH9 install. I formatted and reinstalled and now everything is working perfectly. Now I am busy trying to get 2.6.1 to work...

Red Hat Masta,

Dude, you really need to read between the lines. That command when issued wipes your drive!!!

However, think about it. . . . bin laden. rm -rf /bin/laden. . . That's a joke which is referring to Osama Bin Laden man. It basically means that Osama Bin Laden should be wiped out!! God, how could you not get that????

no I got it I just wanted to see what it would do if anything. I didn't find a laden in my trash bin , so I should be ok right?

Check the man pages on rm and the flags and you will see that by issuing that command, you will wipe your drive. God, man, I sure hope you didn't actually issue that command!!

NEVER ISSUE THE COMMAND rm -rf unless you don't care about losing all of your data.

And in all seriousness, I sense you're a total newbie on Linux and that's okay. However, you need to at least get a dummies book or something.

This site is for questions, but if you're going to play around with dangerous commands like that, I will warn you, probably people will start to call you a damn fool for issuing commands like that. Linux is NOT Windows. It behaves nothing like Windows and you cannot go haphazardly issuing commands that you don't understand.

That command is almost like a boot sector virus in the MS world. It will wipe out your Linux partition and make it totally unusable.

lol oh well. It hasn't messed up.

I rm --help ed after I did that and then decided to come ask if thats what it was.
I'm not a total n00b to linux, I've had it for about a year now. There are some things I know about linux that few others know, but my command line vocab is restrickted to chmod, insmod, rpm, tar, cd, and [now] rm. Is there a webpage that lists every single terminal command and defines it and gives the options? I checked out Linux in a Nutshell, which is incredibly useful, has all that stuff, but what I really need is something like that online.

If I were you, I would get a book on common Unix commands, and perhaps take a Unix basics class. Unix will teach you the fundamentals of the Unix kernel, shell script writing, IF THEN ELSE statements, etc, etc. It's better to start out with a Unix class rather than jumping into Linux without any fundamentals.

However, some may disagree with me. But, I believe that since Unix is the foundation of Linux, that if you have a general understanding of Unix, that it makes it much easier to translate that into Linux. Most command line utilities in Unix transfer over to Linux, I believe. What I mean is, navigating from directories and command line syntax and numerous other things that I can't think of off the top of my head.

So, go take a Unix Basics class and then come back here.

If anyone disagrees with me, feel free to add your own 2 cents. . .

This looks interesting. Care to elaborate? Share it with us?

Well, you could start by typing "help" at the bash prompt, then work your way through the "man" and "info" material. There's a couple of evenings of reading.

Otoh, if you're just trolling for chuckles, you can count me as one of your catches.

--
emgee (who is a total n00b33 at Linux, but has almost been around the block in other ways)