by Hello,
I too am experiencing this netscape bus error that many others have
described. However, I have not seen anyone with a detailed
diagnostic of the problem. And more importantly, I haven't seen any
viable solutions to this.
I will attempt to provide a good description of the symptoms. I am
convinced that this is merely a setup issue. If it weren't, more
people would be complaining about this than the handful that have been
up until now. It seems there are a lot of people who are using
netscape with no problems on RedHat 5.1.
I recently installed RedHat 5.1 on my Pentium II machine.
I then installed the netscape-common and netscape-communicator
packages from the RedHat Errata page. (I had the same problems though
before I updated the netscape package).
If I run netscape as any user except root, netscape crashes with the
infamous "Bus Error" message whenever netscape wants to pop up a
message dialog. For example, say I type in some bogus hostname like
"test" in the location entry box. Usually netscape searches around
for the host and finally spits out a dialog titled "Netscape: Error"
with the text "A network error occurred: unable to connect to server
...." In my case, netscape searches for the host's ip address
and just before it wants to pop up the error dialog it crashes. This
is the case for any other dialog such as the security confirmation or
pop mail password query. Another strange things that occurs is that
although the first netscape that crashes doesn't clean up the lock
file, I am able to start up a second version of the browser with
dialog saying "Netscape has detected a lock ...."
However, if I run netscape as root everything works perfectly! No
problems with dialogs popping up, and the lock detection behaves
properly.
I suspect this is some permission problem. I noticed someone else had
a similar hunch. I tried something to test the possibility. As a
user, I changed the permissions on my .netscape directory to
unaccessible. Sure enough, netscape gives a bus error at startup and
can't get past this problem. So I restored my .netscape back to how
it should be, and looked around my file system for anything
suspicious, but unforutnately have not found anything of yet.
This version of netscape is a glibc version, so I don't think the
fixes described for libc.5.x.x are appropriate here. I don't think it
is specifically a glibc problem since root can run netscape with
irregards. I have also tried killing my .netscape directory and
letting netscape create a new one. This has absolutely no effect on
the problem.
I'd appreciate it you could provide any information on the matter.
Also I don't know how to post this information to the redhat mailing
lists. I figure someone might know something there, or that it might
catch the eye of someone working at RedHat. Could you let me know
what I should do for that?
Thanks,
Gopal