Hi,

Today my roomate needed to use my PC as something was wrong with his so I let him use a guest account on my linux box.

Firefox would not work for him at all, he would type in a URL and nothing would happen.

I then logged in as root and the same problem, firefox wouldn't work. Then I would log into my account and it was fine.

Konqueror works fine on all accounts so it's definitley something strange happening with firefox.

Also if I loaded a page in Konqueror and then tried the same page in Firefox it would work as firefox would read the cache.

I copied the .mozilla directory from my account into root's account and then root could use firefox with my settings, bookmarks etc.

I tried the same for my roomates account and it didn't work.

Anyone got any ideas????


Cheers,

Maybe the working account has configured a proxy server and the others don't?

You check the permissions of the .mozilla directory you copied into your roommates home directory?

Sounds like a proxy problem. But sometimes it helps to get a command-shell and try a command line dig.

I'd wager that Firefox has some kind of per-user configuration file, stored in that directory, and I'd also wager that the application also has some global place, as in somewhere in /etc... where "the system administrator" (that means you, of course) can put files that will apply by-default to every user on the system. If you're using a proxy or somesuch, you'll need to put the settings there.

It is a very good idea to give a guest-account (just don't call it guest...) for each individual who wishes to use your computer.

(And, as you know and as you have done, a non-root, "perfectly ordinary joe" account for yourself.)

Nope this is not a networking problem, no proxy no nothing.

As I mentioned Firefox works on one account and not on others, and konqueror works on all accounts.

I just installed Firefox 1.5 and it's still not working. Why would firefox have a file in /etc/ ? That would be way out of place for a user application to have it's configuration file.

If it were a permission problem then why doesn't it work for root surely root has permission to do what it wants? I installed firefox as root so it should work.

This is really annoying!

You can use profile manager to create a new profile. Just run:

Oops several months late, I forgot to reply with my own fix.

The problem was that 192.168.1.1 is my router's address and also the address I use for DNS resoltion in /etc/resolv.conf

For some reason that worked ok for my own account on my box but for other accounts e.g. root and guest accounts it didn't.

The solution was to put the DNS server addresses of my ISP into /etc/resolv.conf and it worked after that. Incidently telnet didn't like it either if the router was the DNS server.