Category Archives: Administrative

A Suggestion for Mozilla

In the next version of Firefox, can you please put in a little utility that tells me which tab in which browser instance is causing it to eat up the CPU? Just this blog post took several minutes to create…

[Update Tuesday morning]

Folks, note that this is not a memory problem (I’ve got eight gigs of RAM) — it is a CPU problem. I have a quad-core Phenom II, and it still gets brought to its knees, at least in Firefox, but sometimes it slows down everything.

Firefox Problems

So, I recently upgraded to Firefox 4 in Fedora Core 14. It’s not officially supported (it’s supposed to be part of Core 15), but it seemed to install all right from an rpm. The other day, after an unrelated reboot, it started acting strangely. It wouldn’t reload my tabs from the previous session (the “Restore” button did nothing but go gray when I hit it). Also, it’s no longer loading Firefox 4 when I click on the icon for it — it loads 3.6. I actually removed 3.6, and 4, and reinstalled 4, using yum (after renaming my old .mozilla folder). I didn’t reinstall 3.6. Yet when I run Firefox, it runs 3.6. Other symptoms — the Firefox tab in the task manager at the bottom of the screen has no Firefox icon (it’s just generic), the search function doesn’t work.

Does anyone have any idea what’s going on?

[Update a while later]

Per a suggestion in comments, I did find a Firefox 5 package for Fedora 14. It seems to be working all right so far, except I’ve probably lost all the open tabs I had (and there were many dozen). Though perhaps all of the open tabs were part of my problem…

Fedora Sound Problem

For the first time evah, I finally got the Nvidia drivers installed on my machine (I had been using nouveau), and the video is great. Problem is, I’ve lost sound in videos. It’s not an intrinsic sound problem — I can still hear system sounds, and the audio in Second Life (which is the reason I finally broke down and fought with the system to get the video drivers installed) is fine. But when I play Youtube, silence. Anyone have any ideas?

[Update a while later]

It’s not just Youtube — videos in general don’t work (e.g., PJTV).

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, continuing to narrow it down. It’s a Firefox problem. Things are fine in Opera (which I assume means that it’s not an underlying Flash problem).

[Update a few minutes later]

Never mind. I shut down and restarted Firefox, and all seems to be well now…

Buried

I spent the weekend visiting relatives in Columbia, MO, and then got up at five this morning to fly down to West Palm Beach, where the rest of the week will be consumed with getting a house ready to rent in Boca. So don’t be shocked if blogging is light. I was up until midnight last night with the emergency response to the latest Loren Thompson libel, but don’t have time for a lot else.

Off The Air

…Because I’ll be in the air. Actually, the flight to St. Louis will probably have wi-fi, but I don’t know if I’ll bother to spring for the ten bucks. I have some reading to catch up on. Also, ever since American narrowed their seat pitch, it’s been a pain to use a laptop.

Firefox Crash

I’m running Fedora 14. Firefox just crashed after running a pingtest, so badly that it crashed the entire X session, and I had to log in again. After I did, Firefox wouldn’t run. This is the relevant dump from dmesg:

[1062274.346357] npviewer.bin[1011]: segfault at 0 ip 011bd8d1 sp bf92af30 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1062375.997150] npviewer.bin[28464]: segfault at 418 ip 01062d36 sp bfbacf78 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1062498.325768] npviewer.bin[28520]: segfault at 418 ip 0110dd36 sp bfbce888 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[ea0000+b5f000]
[1371957.400980] npviewer.bin[28552]: segfault at 418 ip 01062d36 sp bf817ed8 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1403459.772959] npviewer.bin[25390]: segfault at 0 ip 011bd8d1 sp bfe2c3a0 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1403521.953639] npviewer.bin[19679]: segfault at b74e10b4 ip 011bd8c3 sp bffd8c50 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1403534.814715] npviewer.bin[19700]: segfault at b74ce0b4 ip 012f58c3 sp bfbb4a60 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[f2d000+b5f000]
[1403650.824521] npviewer.bin[19728]: segfault at b73750b4 ip 011bd8c3 sp bfcea8d0 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1406090.206902] npviewer.bin[19767]: segfault at 0 ip (null) sp bf98d91c error 4 in libcanberra-gtk.so.0.1.6[101000+4000]
[1406298.346733] npviewer.bin[20332]: segfault at b34910ac ip 012ec8e7 sp bfe89810 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[f24000+b5f000]
[1406390.968454] npviewer.bin[20409]: segfault at b73790ac ip 013418e7 sp bfe87630 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[f79000+b5f000]
[1406394.694160] npviewer.bin[20453]: segfault at 0 ip (null) sp bff6e50c error 4 in libcanberra-gtk.so.0.1.6[101000+4000]
[1406482.581431] npviewer.bin[20491]: segfault at b738a0ac ip 011bd8e7 sp bf897d40 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1407389.328409] npviewer.bin[20548]: segfault at b1e9c0b4 ip 011c58c3 sp bff96360 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[dfd000+b5f000]
[1413310.714710] npviewer.bin[20658]: segfault at 0 ip 011bd8d1 sp bfb7c980 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1413487.146169] npviewer.bin[21737]: segfault at 418 ip 01062d36 sp bfa3b328 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1413659.608758] npviewer.bin[21767]: segfault at 30 ip 00e4fdad sp bf913df0 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1413665.509196] npviewer.bin[21825]: segfault at b747a0ac ip 011bd8e7 sp bfd35e50 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1414498.463725] npviewer.bin[21851]: segfault at 0 ip 012f58d1 sp bfb76430 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[f2d000+b5f000]
[1416022.503463] npviewer.bin[22016]: segfault at 418 ip 0119ad36 sp bfaf4a68 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[f2d000+b5f000]
[1416030.061756] npviewer.bin[22354]: segfault at 418 ip 01062d36 sp bfbe9aa8 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1418029.336434] npviewer.bin[22371]: segfault at 0 ip 011bd8d1 sp bfcac160 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1418600.114036] npviewer.bin[22753]: segfault at 418 ip 0119ad36 sp bfc08258 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[f2d000+b5f000]
[1419010.022176] npviewer.bin[22947]: segfault at 418 ip 01062d36 sp bfe620a8 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1419276.583851] npviewer.bin[23002]: segfault at 418 ip 01062d36 sp bfc1a618 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1420339.662730] npviewer.bin[23097]: segfault at 418 ip 01062d36 sp bfd25ff8 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1420721.302191] npviewer.bin[23365]: segfault at 418 ip 01062d36 sp bfc00268 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1420762.291919] npviewer.bin[23423]: segfault at b6ab9888 ip 0125fd0f sp bfee5e70 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1420805.073735] npviewer.bin[23459]: segfault at 418 ip 01062d36 sp bfd4cd98 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1420811.931679] npviewer.bin[23483]: segfault at b6a8d928 ip 0125fd0f sp bfe061e0 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1423898.166306] npviewer.bin[23505]: segfault at 418 ip 01062d36 sp bf8484c8 error 6 in libflashplayer.so[df5000+b5f000]
[1424713.197214] npviewer.bin[24368]: segfault at 0 ip 012f58d1 sp bfda9c10 error 4 in libflashplayer.so[f2d000+b5f000]
[1424726.845856] npviewer.bin[24590]: segfault at 80000000 ip 80000000 sp bf97e5dc error 4

I tried removing firefox and reinstalling, and npviewer isn’t a package. But still no joy. Does anyone have any idea what to do? Maybe reinstall flash?

[Update a while later]

I deleted the .mozilla folder, and it seems to be OK now. It even preserved my tabs.