Now we might be getting somewhere...
On Fri, Feb 25, 2022 at 16:19 (-0800), William Morder via tde-users wrote:
On Friday 25 February 2022 16:01:41 Jim wrote:
One more try...
I'm still curious as to what exactly that means.
If you open a terminal window and try to start (for example) firefox, by typing firefox to the shell prompt and pressing the enter key, *exactly* what happens? Saying "doesn't start" is vague to the point of meaninglessness.
(Or opera or vivaldi or whatever browser you like.)
Does the shell say something like "command not found"?
Does the shell report the browser crashed?
Do you get a prompt back, but no window shows up on your screen?
Do you not get a prompt back?
Are there absolutely no error messages or similar that show up in your terminal window?
Sorry, but I have never had a problem quite like this. I don't even know where to begin. I've been running TDE since about 2010, off and on, and KDE3 before that from about 2006. This is a first for me.
As it happens, I have been experimenting with just that approach. Here is what I get from trying to start Firefox from a konsole window.
$ firefox (firefox-esr:19742): Gtk-ERROR **: 16:12:42.109: GTK+ 2.x symbols detected. Using GTK+ 2.x and GTK+ 3 in the same process is not supported ExceptionHandler::GenerateDump cloned child ExceptionHandler::WaitForContinueSignal waiting for continue signal... 19749 ExceptionHandler::SendContinueSignalToChild sent continue signal to child Trace/breakpoint trap
I've never seen an error specifically like that before. Having said that, the error message is reasonably informative.
On my system (Slackware64 15.0) firefox uses libgtk-3.so.0. How exactly your version of firefox is (presumably) linking to libgtk2 is an interesting question, but my offhand guess is that you have somehow ended up with an inconsistent set of libraries, and some other library that firefox (and your other browsers) pull in has been linked against gtk2, rather than gtk3.
On my system a running firefox has 95 dynamic libraries pulled in, and tracking through which of yours loads in gtk2 might be quite the hunt.
Or not...
On my system firefox is the following shell script: ------------------------------------------------------------ #!/bin/sh # # Shell script to start Mozilla Firefox. # # Don't reset the user profile on a detected browser downgrade: export MOZ_ALLOW_DOWNGRADE=1
# Start Firefox: exec /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox "$@" ------------------------------------------------------------
If yours is similar (note that you might have lib instead of lib64, for example), you could try
env MOZ_ALLOW_DOWNGRADE=1 strace /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox |& less
and then use /libgtk2 to find where one of the gtks is loaded in, type u to go up half a page and see if you can figure out a recently-loaded library which might itself be loading gtk2. If you find that, then maybe you have found the guilty party. But then you'd have to decide why it is guilty, and whether you have installed an inconsistent version of the guilty library.
Admittedly, the above is neither for the faint of heart nor for people who have no idea about what the output of "strace" means.
Good luck, you might need it.
Jim