Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

"Couldn't load XRE functions" when starting FF 18.0, Linux.

  • 6 replies
  • 68 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by fredex

fredex
fredex
more options

just installed FF 18.0 on Linux (Centos 5.8) where 17.0.1 has been running fine.

I always install in a local (to my login) directory, and have a desktop launcher to start it. I download each .tar.bz2 FF package to a subdir, where I unpack it, overwriting whatever was already in the firefox directory in that location.

doing that, I get the error above. so I renamed the directory and did a fresh extraction into the firefox directory that tar creates when unpacking the archive. SAME PROBLEM.

moving that directory aside and re-extracting the 17.0.1 archive yields a working Firefox.

What can I do to solve this problem?

the troubleshooting info below came from FF 17.0.1, since FF18.0 doesn't work.

just installed FF 18.0 on Linux (Centos 5.8) where 17.0.1 has been running fine. I always install in a local (to my login) directory, and have a desktop launcher to start it. I download each .tar.bz2 FF package to a subdir, where I unpack it, overwriting whatever was already in the firefox directory in that location. doing that, I get the error above. so I renamed the directory and did a fresh extraction into the firefox directory that tar creates when unpacking the archive. SAME PROBLEM. moving that directory aside and re-extracting the 17.0.1 archive yields a working Firefox. What can I do to solve this problem? the troubleshooting info below came from FF 17.0.1, since FF18.0 doesn't work.

All Replies (6)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

It is always best to create a new directory and extract the content from the tar.bz2 archive to that directory instead of doing this in a directory that already has a Firefox installation or you can delete all the files in it.

fredex
fredex Question owner
more options

as you can see in my posting, I also did that. No change.

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.

See "Creating a profile":

If the new profile works then you can transfer some files from an existing profile to the new profile, but be careful not to copy corrupted files.

johnofgaunt
johnofgaunt
more options

It seems firefox 18 requires glibc 2.11 which centos 5 does not have. So I upgraded to 17.0.2 esr.

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

Weird:

The system requirements for Firefox 17.0.1 show: GLib 2.22 or higher

The system requirements for Firefox 17.0.2 (esr) and Firefox 16.0.2 show: GLib 2.12 or higher

fredex
fredex Question owner
more options

these pages say "glib". which is NOT the same as glibc, which an earlier poster in this series said required a later version than I have. Was that earlier poster mistaken, perhaps, should have said "glib" ??

and when it says "glib", does that mean the package(s) that red hat/centos name "glib2-2.*.rpm" ??