Running Nvu in Linux as an Unprivileged User :: WA7V.COM :: Columbia Basin Internet <-> Packet Radio Gateway

Running Nvu in Linux as an Unprivileged User
Tuesday, 23 January, 2007, 21:34 PST

I just had an interesting experience on my Slackware 11.0 workstation at the office. I installed Nvu Web Authoring System to help facilitate some HTML editing, and it ended up creating more work for me! I cheated and grabbed a precompiled Slackware package to speed up the process, and it installed without incident. I then ran it once as root to ensure everything would work properly, and it did. However when I went back to my own (mere mortal user) shell prompt, I couldn't get Nvu to launch a window no matter how hard I tried. I tried tweaking on the Mozilla scripts, looking over various files and environment variables, searching the Internet, but found nothing that helped my situation. The program would go through a few steps and always hang, falling short of actually launching an application window.

Finally, I compared the prefs.js file in root's profile with the one in my own profile. I found that my prefs.js file appeared to be truncated and was incomplete. Here's what root's prefs.js file looked like, and what mine was missing colored in red:

# Mozilla User Preferences

/* Do not edit this file.
*
* If you make changes to this file while the browser is running,
* the changes will be overwritten when the browser exits.
*
* To make a manual change to preferences, you can visit the URL about:config
* For more information, see http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#prefs
*/

user_pref("extensions.disabledObsolete", true);
user_pref("extensions.lastAppVersion", "1.0");
user_pref("intl.charsetmenu.composer.cache", "ISO-8859-1");
user_pref("pinger.pinged", " 1.0 ");
user_pref("tipoftheday.openAtStartup", false);

I had already tried deleting my own profile and restarting Nvu so that it would recreate the profile directory, but that hadn't worked. I decided to try copying root's prefs.js file over to my own and see what would happen. What do you know? It worked! I'm not certain why Nvu was stalling out there, but it turns out to be an easy fix.

I also learned that there is a Nvu "unofficial bug-fix release" called KompoZer. I may give that a try sometime in the near future.