Preferences window not displaying in Firefox 3.6 on slackware-current
 

I have Firefox 3.6 installed on slackware64-current and everything works correctly.
However when I use Firefox 3.6 on slackware-current (32bit) and I do Edit -> Preferences, the window is opened but the content does not display. If I click the close button, Firefox terminates, but I can no longer get the focus onto another window and I have to restart X with Ctrl-Alt-backspace.
(The same thing happens when I try to logout of LQ!).
I have tried reinstalling Firefox 3.6 and jre to no avail. I have tried removing my ~/.mozilla/firefox to build a new profile. The same problem also occurs as root.
I have reverted to Firefox 3.5.7 and all is OK.

Is there some setting to do with popups that I have missed?

That is odd. What do you mean "the content does not display"? Do you mean that when you click Edit--->Preferences you get a blank window?
Everything seems to be okay when I click on Edit---->Preferences in Firefox 3.6 on 32 bit Slackware-current.

I get a frame with no content.

If it is working for you, then perhaps there some library that I need to reinstall.

Are you by chance using scim?
Because I am experiencing the same kind of problem with firefox
(and I am using scim).

The problem happens here as you describe.

I also get the same problem when I bring up the downloads window.

Or when I go to close the browser and have several tabs open
when the window opens for (quit/cancel/save tabs).

When I kill all the scim stuff,
I can then see the text in the window.

Just a thought.
HTH

Interesting. I'm not using scim and I do not see the problems as described in this thread.

hitest, that is odd. When I turn off scim, I do not encounter the problem. It is only when scim is on that I encounter the problem.

I have reinstalled Firefox 3.6 and by ensuring that scim is off I now get the correct display of tabs in the Preferences frame. Thanks to aocab for getting me this far!
I still have a problem that when I click on a tab within the frame, the tab is not selected and I can no longer get the focus onto another window and I have to restart X with Ctrl-Alt-backspace.
By starting firefox from a terminal window, I see these messages when the problem occurs.
Inspection of dmesg output shows this line:
Output of 'ps ax | grep scim' before and after shows that the scim-bridge process has died.

I have tried reinstalling the scim-1.4.9-i486-4.txz package (that contains libscim-1.0.so.8.2.4), but the problem continues.
I am not very familiar with scim, so any other suggestions are welcome.

allend, from the output you posted is looks
like scim is still starting.

At least it was for me.
Every time I exited scim, it would restart.

I ended up removing the executable bit on
/etc/profile.d/scim.sh and scim.csh

And I changed the input method in
qtconfig from scim-bridge to xim.

I have no idea where scim was getting started
from because it was not started from those
scripts. The only thing I can think of that
was causing scim to start was the input method
setting in qtconfig.

Or you could go to another terminal and killall
the scim programs and things should be back to
normal for a while until you get another popup
window in firefox (at least that was how it was
for me).

Every time a popup opened, the popup had no text
and the system would sort of freeze where I could
not type in anywhere.

After killing all the scim stuff, the text would
appear in the popup and I could type again.

HTH
Cheers

OK - I killed off scim by doing this (and rebooting) and now all appears OK.
I will put down my problem to having scim running without a .UTF8 locale being specified (my best guess at this time).

Thanks again aocab.

I'm still having the problems.

And I have scim configured as usual (using the defaults) and
scim appears to be working fine in all of the apps I checked
(kwrite, konsole, gimp, thunderbird, and dolphin).

However, if I run firefox like so:
GTK_IM_MODULE="scim" firefox

I do not experience the problems.

Cheers

I understand this is not direct help, but in order to provide more fuel to analysis SCIM works with Firefox on Slackware current just fine
here.

Thus, before the problem is declared to be odd, Firefox and SCIM setup and configuration should be tested.

Just in case,

$ env | grep UTF
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
$ env | grep scim
XIM_PROGRAM=/usr/bin/scim -d
QT_IM_MODULE=scim-bridge
GTK_IM_MODULE=scim-bridge
$

Oh, I am posting to a solved threads! My bad...

@AGer - Not a problem for me. I am curious as to where you are setting the LANG environment variable.
On my Slackware32 system and on my Slackware64 system, /etc/profile.d/lang.sh both contain 'export LANG=en_US', yet Firefox 3.6 did not work on my Slackware32 without killing scim. The difference intrigues me. It probably means that I have some old setting somewhere in my Slackware32, but I have not been able to track it down.

I have consulted grep and am reasonably sure that I set LANG only in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh, corresponding /etc/profile.d/lang.csh, and also in ~/.bashrc as alias mcc='LANG= mc' to use it with rxvt.

I should fess up to my 'doh moment'. I found that in my Slackware 32 setup, I was starting scim by having /etc/profile.d/scim.sh and scim.csh set executable. However in my Slackware 64 setup, scim was not starting as /etc/profile.d/scim.sh and scim.csh were NOT set executable.

[edit] Slackware does appear to supply much information on scim. I did find this in case it is of interest. http://www.linuxcertif.com/man/1/scim/ [/edit]