[Techtalk] debug info: Firefox and Thunderbird?

[Wim De Smet]

On Dec 10, 2007 11:04 PM, Deborah Gronke Bennett
<deborah at deborah.best.vwh.net> wrote:
> I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 plus all the latest updates on my laptop.
> Recently, I've started to have random crashes from Firefox and
> Thunderbird. Before this the programs would stay up for many, many days
> (sometimes weeks) without problems. Now one or both of these programs
> are crashing almost every day. When they crash, the window just
> disappears, no error message appears on the screen. These crashes are
> frequent enough that I want to collect any debug info I can so I can
> google to see if I'm having a known problem or not.
>
> I run a stock distribution (that is, I don't build debug versions of
> these programs). Are there any tricks for gathering debug information
> from them? I noticed that Thunderbird has an error console, but it's
> going to disappear when the program crashes. I'm looking for some way to
> dump debug info into a logfile somewhere. Any hints, suggestions, places
> to look for tips?

Normally something should get logged to .xsession-errors (it's where
stdout/stderr usually goes for applications you run on the desktop).

I remember from reporting a bug the debian iceweasel package also
suggest doing the following to check where the problem might be:
1) turn off extensions (try starting with -safe-mode, see if it still
happens; might not apply if you can't trace where the bug is coming
from)
2) try running with MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 (pango rendering disabled)
3) try a clean .mozilla/firefox directory (move the current one out of the way)
4) make sure your lo (loopback interface) is up (shouldn't they list
this before all the others? :))
5) remove all plugins, try again
6) install the relevant -dbg package and run -g on the command line.
Unfortunately this is very slow and also somewhat requires you to know
when or where the bug will crop up. The gdb commands would be:
set pagination off
run
bt full

All of these are paraphrased from the debian reportbug hint file. I
hope they don't sue me for copyright infringement. ;-)

greets,
Wim