[CentOS] Centos 5.8: starting firefox-16.0.1 kills X

[fred smith]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 11:00:54PM +0100, Ned Slider wrote:
> On 18/10/12 21:18, fred smith wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 04:10:32PM -0400, fred smith wrote:
> >> On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 01:51:59PM -0600, Zube wrote:
> >>> On Thu Oct 18 03:43:40 PM, fred smith wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>> That doesn't look good ...
> >>>>
> >>>> No, it doesn't. Perhaps I need to reinstall the Nvidia driver.
> >>>> but it's weird that everything seems to just work except for FF 16.0.1.
> >>>
> >>> Confirmed.
> >>>
> >>> FF 16.0.1 from the mozilla site crashes X on CentOS 5.8 32-bit and
> >>> 64-bit if the latest NVIDIA drivers are installed (304.51).  If the
> >>> older drivers (295.71) are used, it seems to be OK.  It's also OK if
> >>> the NVIDIA drivers are not used.  Also seems to be OK on CentOS 6.3.
> >>> I haven't tried older revisions of the 304 series driver.
> >>
> >> but I'm using 290.10, and have been for a few months. it just now
> >> started doing this. very strange.
> >
> > So, I reinstalled the same Nvidia driver (290.10) and now FF 16.0.1
> > works! Go figure. I guess some file may have gotten hosed, somehow.
> >
> 
> The reason is that the NVIDIA installer overwrites some distro files 
> with it's own version of some libs, in this case the offending file is 
> /usr/lib{64}/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so
> 
> So you install the nvidia drivers and everything works just fine, for 
> months.
> 
> Then last week an update was released for xorg-x11-server-Xorg which in 
> turn re-overwrites the nvidia lib with the distro lib and you see the 
> error you reported earlier along with the symptoms you describe.
> 
> Then you reinstalled the nvidia drivers which of course over wrote the 
> newly updated distro version of libglx.so (again) and everything was 
> back working as before.

that all makes perfect sense, except,... why did everything ELSE
still work? (I admit to not having tried any of the GL screensaver
demos, or any high-end GL games...)

> 
> The solution is not to use the NVIDIA provided binary drivers but 
> instead to use the same drivers properly packaged by elrepo for your 
> distro. The elrepo rpm package installs these libs to a separate 
> directory where they will not conflict with the original distro libs and 
> you will void this type of mess. Not to mention you don't need to 
> reinstall the drivers every time there is a new kernel update.

I'm sure this is a good idea. but I've been doing it this way for
soooooo long that I tend to not think of it until I've already done
it the old-fashioned way. (we get set in our ways when we get old! :) )

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