Re: [gentoo-user] About firefox

[Holly Bostick <motub@planet.nl>]

Luigi Pinna schreef:
> Alle 15:03, domenica 21 agosto 2005, Holly Bostick ha scritto:
> [...]
> 
>>Extensions that *must* be installed by root are, afaik, global
>>installations by default. But this may not have been one of them. Did
>>you try installing it as a user and get an error saying that the
>>extension couldn't be written to /usr/lib/wherever? If you get such
>>an error, the extension must be installed by root (and is therefore
>>global), because only root can write to /usr/lib/anywhere. If the
>>extension installs as a user, then it's local, but it's quite
>>possible that if you install it as root it will be global (since
>>Firefox almost certainly searches /usr/lib/whatever/plugins for
>>global plugins like flash and other media, prior to then searching
>>~/.mozilla/firefox/profile/plugins for local plugins).
> 
> 
> I tried in the last two days but the insttation is everytime local 
> (there are no questions as the other exstensions!).

I think I could be misunderstanding you; what do you mean by 'the
installation is every time local'? Do you mean that an extension
installed by a particular user (even root) cannot be used by any other
user? This is normal behaviour for most extensions, even in older
versions of Firefox; in fact, I've just done a small test, and it
appears that this is now normal behaviour for all extensions, insofar as
I couldn't find an extension that appeared for the user when installed
by root. This is actually what I would consider correct behaviour and
I'm glad to see it. That no extension asks you if you want a local or
global installation of the extension (they don't do that anymore for a
long time, at least under Firefox. I don't know what Mozilla does these
days)?

Your issue is that the language pack must be explicitly installed by
every user that wants to use it? If that's the case, I'm not quite sure
what the problem is... I'm sure that if one was doing a network
installation of a large number of systems, that there is a way to
specify such things (which I don't know because I'm not administering a
large number of systems, but I can't imagine that an organization like
the Mozilla Foundation would not have made provisions for sysadmins of
large international corporations that might need multiple language
support in a given system-wide installation). But for a small network or
home system, the fact that each user can for themselves choose if they
want the additional languages or not is, afaik, the way it's supposed to
be. Once you know where the language pack is, it takes 5 seconds and one
restart of Firefox to install it. It's not as if it's a big deal for
those who want the functionality, and those who don't don't have to have it.

Are you just confused by the ways Firefox is different from Mozilla, or
is this creating an unmanageable obstacle (i.e. you have to install
Language Packs on a school's computer lab network of 500 computers, and
doing it one by one is ridiculous)?

> 
> Now I found another problem (it is an old problem what I remember was 
> solved): I can't use the mplayerpug-in (I have the 2.85)!
> I use the info from 
> http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net/install.php
> and I copied mplayerplug-in.so   mplayerplug-in.xpt in the firefox 
> directory (/opt/firefox/plugins/) 

/opt/firefox/plugins??? How did you install Firefox? Does the -bin
ebuild install to /opt (I compile mine)? Even so, it seems weird that
the -bin ebuild would have a completely different filetree from the
compiled version... the only way I know (unless the -bin ebuild does
install to /opt) to install Firefox to /opt (under Gentoo) is to use the
Linux installer on the Mozilla site.

In which case, all bets are kinda off, because the Firefox Linux
installer (and the resulting installed Firefox) does not work quite the
same as the one installed by Portage (the one installed by Portage works
better, overall, because it's designed to work with Gentoo, as opposed
to the Mozilla.org installer which has to maintain its own little world,
since it can't know just what distro it's being installed to).

I begin to suspect that all your problems may be related to not having
installed Firefox via Portage, if that is in fact the case.

but firefox says that a plug-in is
> missing...
> What's it wrong?

Firefox isn't looking in /opt/firefox/plugins for its plugins,
apparently, or is unable to use what it finds there. Why, I don't know.
Where it is in fact looking, I also don't know... but on my system, the
mplayer plugin is installed in 2 places:

/opt/netscape/plugins (which is probably a deprecated holdover from a
previous version of something else, something old and not-too-bright)

/usr/lib/nsbrowser/plugins
(this folder is symlinked to /usr/lib/MozillaFirefox/plugins)

You might try the following two commands to see if there are other
directories that Firefox might be searching:

locate firefox/plugins
locate Firefox/plugins

Alternatively, what are the permissions on the plugin files you copied?
It's possible that the user trying to run them doesn't have permissions
to read the files-- i.e., root copied them to opt, but the regular user
is an "other" (neither root nor a member of the group owning the files),
and does not have the necessary permission to read the file when Firefox
is opened and attempts to read the plugin files. Additionally, it's
possible that the user only has permission to read the plugin, and needs
read-write (my plugin is rwx-rwx-rwx, and I'm pretty sure I never
touched them; I wasn't even aware of /usr/lib/nsbrowser until I started
investigating this just now).

> Thanks,
> Luigi
> Ps. I have no more mozilla installed, can it be a/the problem?

Not likely. I (among many others here, I'm sure), don't have mozilla,
and my mplayerplug-in works fine, along with the various others,
including those installed by Wine.

Holly
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