[ale] Please help Drew fix his browser problem

ChangingLINKS.com groups at ChangingLINKS.com
Fri May 20 03:39:46 EDT 2005


Thank you, Dow for taking the time to post the reply entitled 
"Debian issues from Drew" 

I delayed responding because I anticipated Geoffrey repairing the system. 
He bailed on the challenge. Nonetheless, I assume he would have requested your 
help anyway - so I look forward to it.




Getting started  . . .

Without further ado, I will attempt to repair the system again, hopefully with 
ALE help. I have given the problems to several people and trying fixing the 
issues myself and failed. I have tried hiring people and they have failed.

I will approach the list of problems in order, one issue at a time.

The first problem I named "Unstable Browser":
There are 3 browser related problems in this file:


STABILITY 
PROBLEM:*************************************************************************************************************************
I am using Firefox 0.9.1. The problem is that the browser crashes often. For 
example, when I go to http://www.kitco.com/market and then try going to 
another site, the browser crashes. It also crashes when I browse around 
fark.com. These are not the only two sites that have a problem. It seems like 
any site that has flash, java, lots of content, or has bad code will crash 
it. Based on the error message (shown below) someone told me to upgrade the X 
server. Here, you can see the original error, me updating X, and then a new 
error.

Even after running apt-get install xserver-xfree86 kde (to update ALL of the X 
server and KDE) I get the second "gecko" error below

root at not a tty[/]# firefox
selected locale: en-US
The program 'firefox-bin' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadShmSeg (invalid shared segment parameter)'.
  (Details: serial 37 error_code 171 request_code 147 minor_code 2)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)
root at not a tty[/]# Mutex destroy failure: Device or resource busy
ICE default IO error handler doing an exit(), pid = 4016, errno = 0
ICE default IO error handler doing an exit(), pid = 3790, errno = 0

]# apt-get install xserver-XFree86
. . .
Preparing to replace xserver-common 4.3.0.dfsg.1-1 
(using .../xserver-common_4.3.0.dfsg.1-10_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement xserver-common ...
Preparing to replace xserver-xfree86 4.3.0.dfsg.1-1 
(using .../xserver-xfree86_4.3.0.dfsg.1-10_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement xserver-xfree86 ...
Setting up xserver-common (4.3.0.dfsg.1-10) ...

Setting up xserver-xfree86 (4.3.0.dfsg.1-10) ...

]# firefox
selected locale: en-US
The program 'Gecko' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadShmSeg (invalid shared segment parameter)'.
  (Details: serial 37 error_code 171 request_code 147 minor_code 2)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

*******************************************************************************************************************
CUT AND PASTE PROBLEM: IF you update the browser, please make sure that "cut 
and paste" still works the same way it does now. Right now, I can highlight 
the text, and then use the center wheel button to paste the highlighted text 
into a form field in the browser. One time, when I updated to Firefox 1.0, 
this cut and paste feature no longer worked.

*******************************************************************************************************************
AUTOMATIC WEBSITE LOADING PROBLEM: Sometimes I highlight some text TRY TO use 
the wheel to paste it in a browser form but, I MISS THE FORM. When that 
happens, Firefox automatically loads the new web page as though I wanted to 
surf to the URL that I was pasting. Please disable that feature. I never want 
to browse to another page by pasting a URL into an existing web page.


I have tried upgrading xfree86, KDE and firefox (and combinations of those 
solutions). The only "Debian" system that I could observe (Debian systems 
SEEM hard to come by) has a STABLE setup. It is Knoppix.

My latest idea is to try to examine Knoppix and then try to install the same 
versions of each package on my Debian system in hopes of duplicating the 
stability that Knoppix has. My guess is that is not the best solution.


Let's get started . . .
Questions?
Suggestions please?
-- 
Wishing you Happiness, Joy, and Laughter,
Drew Brown
http://www.ChangingLINKS.com



P.S. Please note, I am not going to reject ANY ideas. I will try the things 
suggested and am sincere about fixing this problem. Please keep this thread 
free of personal attacks and such. Please tell me to run commands, and I will 
run them and post the results. I admit that I need some handholding on this - 
I grew deeply tired of this problem months ago.



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