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Accepted
Cam Jones
Asked: 2013-11-14 02:35:47 +0800 CST

Failed to execute child process? Anyone know a fix for this?

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I changed something that I did not mean to change and now everytime I try to open Firefox it says: 

could not launch application, failed to execute child process "firefox" (No such file or directory).

Aybody know a fix for this? I am using Backtrack 5 r3 with Gnome, which is based off of ubuntu 10.04.

10.04

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You have lost the binary file of Mozilla firefox. By lost, I mean it has either been renamed/replaced/moved/deleted; any of these. If you do not know what has actually happened and can afford to lose your firefox data(browsing history, saved passwords, etc.) then the easiest way to procure the binary is to re-install the complete package.

    To re-install, open a terminal and type:

    sudo apt-get purge firefox
sudo apt-get install firefox
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  2. This can be solved by not running the application as a root user, therefore create another user and launch the application from there it works fine.

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  3. FWIW. Export the Address Books from Window > Address Book > Tools > Export.

    Make your own Bookmarks backups to ensure you have the latest. The Mozilla auto saves here may not necessarily contain your last changes.

    Restore your, say, pop.gmail.com mail first.

    Save the, say, /home/user/.mozilla/seamonkey/?#$%^&().default/Mail/pop.gmail.com/msgFilterRules.dat file. After updates you can put it back into the .default file in the same position. That file name will not be the same again! But you will have your filters back. If your Inbox structure was changed after your last msgFilterRules.dat backup, you will have to Choose folders again for every filter.

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