On 09/20/2016 11:02 AM, Yasha Karant wrote: > We use current production (not beta / pre-release) releases of x86-64 > Linux Mozilla Firefox (as well as Mozilla Thunderbird), not the distro > ESR version. There are a number of reasons for this that can be > discussed under separate cover. The environment is SL7x. > > Firefox often (almost always) fails to open, with the diagnostic: > > [ykarant@localhost ~]$ /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox > XPCOMGlueLoad error for file /usr/lib64/firefox/libxul.so: > libmozgtk.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory > Couldn't load XPCOM. > > A simple script "fixes" the problem. I keep the run directory > /usr/lib64/firefox that has the installed compressed tarball files > duplicated in /usr/lib/firefox-current , and then as root superuser rm > -rf the run directory followed by a directory copy of the duplicate > directory into a new copy of the run directory. > > Does anyone know what causes current standard production firefox from > "destroying" > /usr/lib64/firefox/libxul.so ? > > Yasha Karant Are you sure it is libxul.so that is the problem and not libmozgtk.so? It looks like xul is trying to load mozgtk and can't find it. I use the included ESR, so am not sure what the Mozilla tarballs include, but having the matching xul/xulrunner is critical. Have you run a diff on the directory before/after it fails? (diff -rupP /usr/lib64/firefox-current /usr/lib64/firefox > /tmp/diff.out) It may be worthwhile to run it with the directories listed in the opposite order, to catch files that come and go. I don't recall all my diff switches off the top of my head. Checking things with 'ldd' may also be useful. -Mark