Firefox path problem since 9.10 upgrade

**rcbinwi** · October 19th, 2010

I just upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 on a Dell e1405. I dual boot Ubuntu and XP. I had Firefox running off of a single profile/path for both OS's. Since the upgrade, I have not been able to use Firefox from Ubunutu, though XP has been working fine.

For a while I was getting an error when I launched Firefox. The error was the "Firefox is currently running." (I don't have the exact wording of the message because I haven't been seeing it recently.) This was typical if Ubuntu couldn't access the XP partition, such as when I had left XP in hibernate mode.

Then more recently I've been getting the message, "Could not launch application. Failed to execute child process "/home/richard/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini" (Permission denied)."

From what I can tell, profiles.ini has not changed. The XP side of things don't seem to have changed, either.

Any advice? Thanks!

**rcbinwi** · October 19th, 2010

More information: Previously, I was trying to boot Firefox from the shortcut. I just tried booting Firefox from a terminal. I got the error message "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the eisting Firefox process, or restart your system."

When I try to boot Firefox from root, sudo Firefox, I get, "(firefox-bin:2658): GLib-WARNING **: g_set-prgname() called multiple times."

Oddly, I get the same error message for Thunderbird, except the beginning is (thunderbird-bin:2680), when I boot it from a terminal rather than the shortcut. But Thunderbird works. It runs with separate profiles in the two OS's, unlike my Firefox.

**WorMzy** · October 19th, 2010

I do the same thing as you -- one Fx profile for all my OS', but I've never had this problem. Still, lets see if we can figure out what's wrong.

First, can you run

Code:

ls -l ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini

make sure that it's owned by you, and has rwx for your user. If you've run firefox with sudo for whatever reason, then there's a chance that root has taken possession of this file. (You shouldn't use sudo for graphical applications for this reason; use gksu or gksudo)

If it's not owned by you, run

Code:

sudo chown $USER:$USER ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini

If the permissions aren't right, then run

Code:

chmod u+rwx ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini

Does Fx launch now?

If not, try launching it with the following arguments:

Code:

firefox -P /path/to/the/shared/profile/folder

If that works, then open profiles.ini in vim (or your favourite text editor) and make sure that the Path variable for your firefox profile is set correctly.

**rcbinwi** · October 19th, 2010

Thanks! When I run ls -l ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini, I get:

Code:

-rw-r--r-- 1 richard richard 256 2009-11-3 15:03 /home/richard/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini

So does this mean I have possession of the file?

In any case, I ran the other code.

(What exactly do I put in $USER? I'm assuming that it should be, in my case $richard:$richard. Is that correct?)

When I run Fx from the path of the correct profile, Fx gives me an option of what profile to run (Ubuntu or XP). I ran XP, where I have the profile. I got the same error: "Firefox cannot use the profile "RichXP" because it is in use. To continue, close the running instance of Firefox or choose a different profile."

Any other ideas?

**WorMzy** · October 19th, 2010

$ means that the next word is going to be a variable, and that the system should use the value of that variable, $USER is just a session variable containing your username (open a terminal and run "echo $USER", you'll see what I mean). You don't need to worry about the chown command anyway, the file is already owned by you.

Your profile.ini doesn't have execute permissions, but I'm not sure whether that's a problem. Mine has execute permissions, and that's all I have to go on, so run the chmod code from my last post; even if it doesn't fix the problem, it won't do any harm.

I made a mistake with the firefox -P command, it should have been

Code:

firefox -profile "/path/to/the/shared/profile/folder"

-P expects a profile name, -profile expects the folder. Also, putting quotes around the path helps if there's spaces in the path. e.g. "/media/Windows/fx profile".

If it's still not working, try creating a new profile via the profile manager. (Alt+F2, firefox -ProfileManager, run). Make the new profile use the same folder as your current shared profile (make a copy of your profile beforehand, just in case something goes wrong - which is unlikely). It may recreate whichever files are erroneously telling firefox that it's in use.