firefox reports "lock: permission denied"; doesn't start.

[Alex Mauer]

In karmic, with firefox-3.5, it refuses to start and displays a message box, "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system." In the terminal, "lock: Permission denied" is displayed.

Firefox is not running when this happens.

[Alex Mauer (hawke)]

an strace of firefox-3.5 shows the following around where the lock error is displayed:
[pid 16470] open("/home/user/.pulse-cookie", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_NOCTTY|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = 30
[pid 16470] fcntl64(30, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_WRLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=0, len=0}, 0xbfda94ec) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
[pid 16470] readlink("/proc/self/exe", "/usr/lib/firefox-3.5.3/firefox"..., 99) = 30
[pid 16470] write(2, "lock: Permission denied\n", 24lock: Permission denied
) = 24

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. I have classified this bug as a bug in firefox-3.5.
For future reference you might be interested to know that a lot of applications have bug reporting functionality built in to them. This can be accessed via the Report a Problem option in the Help menu for the application with which you are having an issue. You can learn more about this feature at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

[dm (jan-rauberg)]

I have the same problem after upgrading to Karmic RC1. I can delete the lockfile, but everytime I start firefox it apears again and I get the message ´Firefox is allready running ...´

[nathan (nate-d-deactivatedaccount)]

I had the same problem. It appears that the problem is that the configuration file in your home directory belongs to root. So to fix it you just run.

sudo chown -R username:username ~/.mozilla

[Fernando Sancho (toptnc)]

My ~/.mozilla directory belongs to my user and still have the problem

[pato101 (pato101)]

Seems that apparmor is avoiding firefox access some files. It is strange because I have one user where firefox just runs and another where it does not.

I've seen that I had apparmor enforced for firefox:
$ sudo cat /sys/kernel/security/apparmor/profiles
[...]
/usr/lib/firefox-3.5.*/firefox (enforce)
[...]

And I've changed to complain (which should be the default on Karmic, and I don't know why I had enforce):
$ sudo aa-complain /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.firefox-3.5
Setting /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.firefox-3.5 to complain mode.

[Alex Mauer (hawke)]

The apparmor change worked for me.

One noteworthy situation on my system at least is that I am using likewise-open to join an active directory domain. So this means that instead of /home/$USER/, the user directories are at /home/WINDOMAIN/$USER/ I don’t know if this is the case for Fernando Sancho or pato101, but I’m fairly sure that’s the culprit for me.

[pato101 (pato101)]

Interesting, Alex!:
The user where apparmor was blocking has /home/pr/$USER home folder instead of /home/$USER. Not using AD, but for historic reasons, the home folder is under non-usual location.

[Fernando Sancho (toptnc)]

Yes, I forgot to mention that i am using likewise-open to join an active
directory too.

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 4:14 PM, Alex Mauer <email address hidden> wrote:

> The apparmor change worked for me.
>
> One noteworthy situation on my system at least is that I am using
> likewise-open to join an active directory domain. So this means that
> instead of /home/$USER/, the user directories are at
> /home/WINDOMAIN/$USER/ I don’t know if this is the case for Fernando
> Sancho or pato101, but I’m fairly sure that’s the culprit for me.
>
> --
> firefox reports "lock: permission denied"; doesn't start.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/430250
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.