253399 - (QFA)Talkback error: Can't initialize.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[kynn jones]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040707 Firefox/0.9.2
Build Identifier: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/#download

I installed (as regular, non-root user) Firefox on my Linux Debian system using
firefox-installer (found in firefox-0.9.1-i686-linux-gtk2+xft-installer.tar.gz),
and the installation went through without any problem, but when I try to run
Firefox, I get the error "(QFA)Talkback error:  Can't initialize."


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use firefox-installer to install Firefox as a non-root user; any suitable
directory will do.
2. Invoke ./firefox from within the installation directory


Actual Results:  
I get the error "(QFA)Talkback error:  Can't initialize."

Expected Results:  
Start up without errors.

Comment 1

[Brent Harsh]

A colleague and I are also seeing this on Mozilla:
1.8a2 (2004071405) and also 1.7 released on his machine.  
Red Hat 7.2
Installed as regular (non-root) users since we don't have root on these work
machines.
This does not occur with 1.7rc2 which I was running up until this afternoon.
Old bug 107287 seemed similar; following its details I did find a .fullcircle
directory in $HOME.  I tarred it up and moved it out, but the problem still
occurs (and no new .fullcircle directory is created, but I suspect from the
dates that this may not even be used anymore and was perhaps leftover from an
old version of Mozilla?)  Have had no crashes to test any talkback type of stuff.

Comment 2

[Brent Harsh]

Reconfirmed on Nightly 20040809 build of Mozilla.  I have also discovered a
"livelink" webpage which crashes mozilla in 1.7 and 1.8 but not in 1.5, so now
the talkback ability to send a stack trace would be quite helpful to report
this.  Can *I* mark this as "confirmed" or does it require a real Mozilla.org
person to do that?  

Comment 3

[Daniel Lipsitt]

I get this error too. Firefox 1.0PR, installed by root. Talkback doesn't start
if I have a crash.

Comment 4

[Ricardo Salcedo]

I'm also getting the message when I startup Firefox as a normal user.  And a
possibly related problem is that an extension (Yahoo companion toolbar,
http://companion.mozdev.org) fails to load.

I notice that if I start Firefox as the root user (or with sudo), both problems
dissapear.  So it seems to be a permission thing.  I tried "chown"ing and
"chmod"ing everything in the Firefox install directory, but that does not seem
to help.

-Ricardo

Comment 5

[Ken Takusagawa]

I also see this error in tonight's mozilla-xft-gtk nightly for linux ("Build ID:
2004111000").  Should the Product field be changed?  (Currently it is just
"Firefox".)

Comment 6

[Marco Franzen]

I also see this in mozilla 1.7.5, 1.7.2 and 1.7, while 1.7.3 and 1.6 are fine.
All five versions were user-locally installed (in ~mozilla/<version>) when they
came out.

I did some stracing and found that the failing versions try (and fail) to find
libstdc++.so.5 immediately before the error message, while the succeeding ones
don't try that. (My box has only libstdc++.so.3 installed.)

So it appears to be a build issue (and maybe depends on the s/w configuration of
the machine that the release happened to be built on): spurious shlib
dependency. (Root or not is likely a red herring.)

Comment 7

[Loic Domaigne]

I see the same problem on my Fedora Core 3 with the official mozilla suite 1.7.5
release. 

From my investigation, it seems that the problem comes from the fact that the
distribution was compiled in a gcc 3.3.x environment (wich has, among others,
the libstdc++.so.5). 

This doesn't work on FC3, because FC3 has a gcc 3.4.x environment. As guessed by
Marco, there are some shlibs mismatches (notably, but not restricted to,
libstdc++.so.5 which is now libstdc++.so.6). 

Recompiling the corresponding mozilla source with gcc 3.4.x solved the problem. 

Regards,
Loic. 

Comment 8

[Marco Franzen]

It would seem to me it is not so much the version of gcc but whether the
Talkback stuff is linked statically or dynamically against libstdc++ (and the
other libs Loic found).

To clarify my previous message. The working versions 1.7.3 and 1.6 not only
don't try to access libstdc++.so.5, but don't try to access any libstdc++ shared
library whatsoever.

Even in the "broken" versions, it is only the Talkback that is not working (on
hosts w/o the shlib). The Mozilla suite proper does not need a libstdc++ shlib,
only Talkback does. (Guessing this is also true for the other libs Loic found
version mismatches for. 1.7.3 official build should work fine on FC3 if my guess
is correct.)

Comment 9

[mattn_jp]

Try to install firefox without "Quality Feedback Agent".

Comment 10

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Talkback is dead.