Known Problems with the Firefox Autopackage

Several people have reported various bugs with Firefox Autopackage. If you run into another problem, please let me know!

Firefox won't start

There are probably a million reasons why this could be, but so far I have only had two reports of this. This one was reported by Alvin Eshe, and was happening on a Mandrake 10.1 box. Firefox was failing to start with the message
Load plug in: failed to initialize shared library /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/rpnp.so
[/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/rpnp.so:undefined symbol:---pure-virtual}
*** loading the extensions datasource

It turns out that the Real Player 8.0 plugin (rpnp.so) is incompatible with Firefox and Mozilla 1.7. This is my reply to Alvin, and it should work on your system too. There are two solutions to the problem:

If you don't care about Real Player 8.0 support in Firefox (I wouldn't), then delete /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/rpnp.so (run "rm /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/rpnp.so" as root from a terminal) and install RealPlayer 10 for Linux--it works great!

If you /do/ care about RealPlayer 8, I looked on google and found one solution: http://www.kelv.net/programming/firefox.php Here's my modification that should work on your system (NOTE: UNTESTED!):

  1. Download and install Real Player.
  2. Copy raclass.zip into /usr/lib/mozilla/
  3. Get hold of an old gcc 2.95 version of libgcc.a.
  4. Create a directory called /usr/local/rpnphack
  5. Copy rpnp.so from /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/ to /usr/local/rpnphack
  6. Copy the 2.95 version of libgcc.a into /usr/local/rpnphack
  7. cd /usr/local/rpnphack
  8. ld -shared -o /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/rpnphack.so /usr/local/rpnphack/rpnp.so /usr/local/rpnphack/libgcc.a
  9. Start Firefox and type about:plugins in the URL bar. You should see the Real Player module is loaded.

The other reason Firefox could be failing to start is do to the infamous "must-run-as-root-first" bug. The first time Firefox is ran, it needs to setup some files that are only writable by root. Simply become root (use `su -` and enter your root password), and run `firefox`. Next time you should be able to run firefox as your user.
Note: This can happen even if you have installed the Firefox package into your home directory.

Package won't install if you double-click on it

Various people have contacted me due to this problem. It turns out that a bug in the Autopackage Support Code is responsible for this, and has been fixed in version 1.0.3 of Autopackage.

To upgrade your support code, run package remove autopackage from a terminal. If you have the support-code installed systemwide, then become root with "su" and run the command. Next, install any Autopackage (even the Firefox Autopackage) by running sh package*.package from the same terminal. The latest version of the support code should automatically be downloaded and installed, along with the package you are trying to install.

If you need more help upgrading the Autopackage support code, then contact me, post a message in the Autopackage Forums, or swing by the Autopackage IRC channel (#autopackage on irc.freenode.net).