Firefox 1.5 won't start--I've tried removing ~/.mozilla, but no luck
 

Not sure exactly what happened to cause this, but I took down X and now the Firefox UI won't load. When I run the binary (from the icon, nothing apparently happens from the shell) the cursor appears to load, and then times out. Looking at the process table (I'm running KDE) tells me that Firefox is still running.

Well, I figure, it's got to be a corrupt profile or something--I've read about this. I back up my profile and erase the directory. No luck, same behavior. I re-install Firefox, same behavior. I try several versions (1.06, and Deer Park, removing .mozilla each time) and nothing changes. Exasperated, I log in as another user, then root (just to check if something weird happened with privileges), and I get no UI.

If I run it from the shell, Firefox gives me no error messages. Everything appears to work, but I get no browser.

Incidentally I am running Slackware 9.0 on the 2.6.7 kernel, with KDE 3.3.2.

Has anybody else had this difficulty? I'd love to hear some advice if you have any. If not, thanks for reading!

Eventide

firefox
 

just try to see, if there is a file called "lock" in your .mozilla folder or in some subfolder. delete this by hand and firefox will start up again...

I'm not really sure, but in Slackware current the cairo-package was added. And I think I remember to have read, that firefox needs this package...

.lock file
 

Yeah, Seelenbild28, I've removed that file--in fact, I have removed the entire .mozilla directory, after making backups. No luck--I get exactly the same lack of response.

I was curious to see what was happening, so I ran an strace on firefox. It runs for a while, and gives a panic and hangs. I don't really know how to interpret this output, though.

Vbisis, I'll look at this package, maybe I did something to mess it up? ;)

firefox
 

did you already try the latest version 1.15 ? check the mozilla page for an rpm, perhaps this works

Problem solved
 

Thanks, everybody who responded. I managed to solve this problem.

I ran ldd against firefox-bin to determine what was linked to firefox. Nothing apparent here, so I used swaret to remove Mozilla (and all of its libraries), and re-install it. No go here, but strace -f firefox-bin gives me a different error off the system calls, and one of these has has an error message involving a library (!). I remove this library, upgrade to a new version, and still no luck. Strace again and find another error, this time in gconf. I remove gconf and re-install it, and everything works.

Seelenbild, I had tried the latest version at the time I wrote this up, but thanks!