SuSE Support Database

Title: Netscape: bus error

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Netscape: bus error

Symptom:

Netscape crashes with bus error

Cause:

Netscape is not compatible with the current libXpm.so.4.8. The problem is known, but it is Netscape's problem. Netscape does not work with the libXpm version 4.8 which is contained in the current XFree86 version.

The fact that this incompatibility appears only with the installed Motif, has the following deeper cause:

Specific windows in Motif contain special bitmaps (e.g. the question dialog contains a question mark). One can change these bitmaps' appearance by installing xpm files in the system with specific names . If these files are available, they are read and announced during the widget construction; if they are not, it is used a compiled by default bitmap.

The question dialog looks for a file named xm_question with the announcement at different places. The Motif development system contains this file in /usr/include/X11/pixmaps . As soon as it is installed, the file /usr/include/X11/pixmaps/xm_question is read into runtime as bitmap. Exactly by this the incompatibility between the libXpm versions 4.6 and 4.8 is obviously revealed.

You can execute just for fun "strace netscape 2>&1 | grep pixmap" and take a look at how many pixmap files netscape looks for. This works (with libXpm.4.8) only as long as none of these files exist.

Solution:

We have created a possibility to avoid it in ftp://ftp.suse.com/suse_update/ Take the packet ftp://ftp.suse.de/pub/special/netscape-wrap.tar.gz, install it and read /usr/local/lib/netscape-lib/README through.

The packet contains the libXpm version 4.6 that runs problemless with Netscape. It has to be installed in /usr/local/lib/netscape-lib/. Therefore Netscape must be always called like that, so the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set in /usr/local/lib/netscape-lib before starting. This works either through a shell function or through a small shell script Netscape (with capital N!!) from the packet ftp://ftp.suse.com/suse_update/special/ntscp_ft.tgz.

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Keywords: NETSCAPE, BUS ERROR, LIBXPM

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Feedback welcome: Send Mail to kfr@suse.de (Please give the following subject: SDB-netscape)

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SDB-netscape, Copyright SuSE GmbH, Nuremberg, Germany - Version: 30. Mar 1998
Impressum - Last generated: 24. Feb 1999 15:16:40 by maddin with sdb_gen 1.00.0