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

Thunderbird & firefox, which used to work reliably, now (couple weeks) often won't start on rhel6 laptop; rebooting or logging out, back in, fixes temporarily.

  • 1 nzaghachinzaghachi
  • 1 nwere nsogbu anwere nsogbu a
  • 2 views
  • Nzaghachi ikpeazụ nke jrbogart

more options

I use the redhat distribution and am up-to-date (thunderbird.x86_64 31.3.0-1.el6_6; firefox.x86_64 31.3.0-3.el6_6). Kernel version is 2.6.32-504.1.3.el6.x86_64

Symptoms (logged in under regular username): when firefox or thunderbird command issued to command line: no response to the command, followed by notification of seg fault.

I've tried

- creating new Firefox profile, copying over only recommended items (e.g., no preference files)

- uninstalling and reinstalling programs via yum


Rebooting the machine always allows me to start up each program at least once. Logging off and logging back in always allows me to start up at least one of them, usually both, but I believe I have seen at least one failure in this case where the second program would not start up.

I have not seen the failure when logged in as root (just to a terminal, not a whole new machine session) but I haven't tried it very often.

My default shell is tcsh and normally the command firefox resolves to /usr/bin/firefox. Issuing the command

   /bin/sh  /usr/bin/firefox

seems to work somewhat better. Issuing a firefox command in a bash terminal is perhaps better still, but I still do occasionally get the failure even there.

I've checked for protection/access problems, e.g. ownership under ~/.mozilla, but everything seems ok.

I use the redhat distribution and am up-to-date (thunderbird.x86_64 31.3.0-1.el6_6; firefox.x86_64 31.3.0-3.el6_6). Kernel version is 2.6.32-504.1.3.el6.x86_64 Symptoms (logged in under regular username): when firefox or thunderbird command issued to command line: no response to the command, followed by notification of seg fault. I've tried - creating new Firefox profile, copying over only recommended items (e.g., no preference files) - uninstalling and reinstalling programs via yum Rebooting the machine always allows me to start up each program at least once. Logging off and logging back in always allows me to start up at least one of them, usually both, but I believe I have seen at least one failure in this case where the second program would not start up. I have not seen the failure when logged in as root (just to a terminal, not a whole new machine session) but I haven't tried it very often. My default shell is tcsh and normally the command firefox resolves to /usr/bin/firefox. Issuing the command /bin/sh /usr/bin/firefox seems to work somewhat better. Issuing a firefox command in a bash terminal is perhaps better still, but I still do occasionally get the failure even there. I've checked for protection/access problems, e.g. ownership under ~/.mozilla, but everything seems ok.

All Replies (1)

more options

A little more possibly-useful information:

The system typically gets into a bad state - neither firefox nor thunderbird able to start - after the computer goes to sleep (suspend) when I close the lid. Certain updates also break it. Yesterday I updated some rpm packages without incident, but updating the flash plugin caused problems.