976123 - Simulator won't start on Linux with bit mismatch

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Simulator, defect)

Description

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

With Firefox 27 - 29 on Linux, I am not able to start either the 1.2 (6.0pre8.20140112) or 1.3 (7.0pre7.20140113) simulators.  However, they do start if I use Firefox 30.

I am testing on Ubuntu 12.04, but another user in IRC (garbas) saw similar issues on NixOS.

Nothing relevant appears in the Browser Console.

Comment 1

[Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] [PTO back August 21]]

It works fine for me. But there might be something wrong with the useragent code that detect if you are using 32 or 64bits system on this page:
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/labs/fxos-simulator/

Can you verify if you downloaded the right version for your system?

For example here is the 1.2 version for 64bits:
  https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/labs/fxos-simulator/1.2/linux64/fxos_1_2_simulator-linux64-latest.xpi
Or 1.2 for 32bits:
  https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/labs/fxos-simulator/1.2/linux/fxos_1_2_simulator-linux-latest.xpi

Comment 2

[Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] [PTO back August 21]]

Having said that, there is certainly some tweaks to add to the simulator code to make such error clearer!

Comment 3

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

Well, you were basically right that it had to do with 32 vs 64 bit, but I feel like many others could fall into this same trap.  Here's what happened to me:

My VM has a 64 bit version of Ubuntu 12.04.

I downloaded Firefox 30 from the main Nightly site[1], and this page offers a 64 bit version, which I grabbed since I know it will work.  From there, I installed the simulator addons from the detection page[2], which correctly detected my 64 bit OS.  This works fine.

I then grabbed Firefox 27 - 29 from the various channel pages[3].  These page *do not* detect that you have 64 bit or advertise that it exists, so you get 32 bit always, unless you dig into "Systems & Languages" and manually find 64 bit.

Of course, I still had the addons I installed before, which are 64 bit, and I tried to use them with these 32 bit Firefox instances, so the addon did not correctly determine the path to the b2g executable that it contained, since it tries Runtime.XPCOMABI to determine this, which gives the bitness of Firefox itself.

To add more confusion, if you do use a 32 bit Firefox on a 64 bit machine, the simulator addon detection page[2] still offers you 64 bits because it instead checks navigator.platform, which reports 64 bits because of the OS, and not 32 bits from Firefox itself.

When you create this situation, there's no error message to help you diagnose at all, you're just left with "Starting simulator...".

:(

So, at the very least, let's try the following:

* Detect bit mismatch and report a user visible error
* Addon install page and addon code should use the same bit detection logic
* Fallback to running anyway if there is a bit mismatch

The 64 bit addon does work correctly with 32 bit Firefox, so we just need to run it.

[1]: http://nightly.mozilla.org/
[2]: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/labs/fxos-simulator/
[3]: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/

Comment 4

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

Garbas, does this help with your issue at all, or is it unrelated?

Specifically, try to determine if you have 32 or 64 bit Firefox installed.  Then, use the direct links Alex provided in comment 1 to install the addon with the matching bitness to see if it resolves anything.

Comment 5

[Rok Garbas [:garbas]]

(In reply to J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] from comment #4)
> Garbas, does this help with your issue at all, or is it unrelated?
> 
> Specifically, try to determine if you have 32 or 64 bit Firefox installed. 
> Then, use the direct links Alex provided in comment 1 to install the addon
> with the matching bitness to see if it resolves anything.

i installed simulator 1.2 (64bit version) and i still see the same error. would be nice to get some more verbose error what/where went wrong.

```
console.error: 
  Message: TypeError: this._client is null
  Stack:
    @resource://gre/modules/commonjs/toolkit/loader.js -> resource://gre/modules/devtools/client/connection-manager.js:186
@resource://gre/modules/commonjs/toolkit/loader.js -> resource://gre/modules/devtools/client/connection-manager.js:285
notify@resource://gre/modules/commonjs/toolkit/loader.js -> resource://gre/modules/commonjs/sdk/timers.js:40
```

Comment 6

[J. Ryan Stinnett [:jryans] (Use needinfo, replies may be slow)]

I've filed bug 980437 about the more general issue of the Simulator not starting on Linux.

Comment 7

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on