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

Fri Oct 19 09:44:14 UTC 2012
Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk>

On 19/10/12 02:36, fred smith wrote:
> 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...)
>

Only applications using OpenGL would be affected.

If you want to test for yourself, try running 'glxgears'.