Fix random crashes Firefox, Thunderbird and Evolution on Ubuntu 8.10
What do you expect of a decent modern OS? A great browsing experience and a decent mail client. Since I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 I had troubles with random crashes of Firefox when loading pages, and entirely random crashes of Evolution mail client.
So I switched to Thunderbird. But then same symptoms started showing. Giving me 5-10 crashes of Thunderbird a day, and serious troubles on heavy browsing.
The first things to do when getting crashes of Mozilla products are:
- 1. Make sure you don’t have a lethal combination of add-ons
- 2. Check if Flash isn’t the evil spirit haunting your browser, try the Flashblock add-on
- 3. Make a new profile for Firefox and Thunderbird, by renaming your old configuration. You can find the configuration folders in your home. Mostly ~/.mozilla for Firefox, and ~/.mozilla-thunderbird for Thunderbird.
- 4. Completely remove Firefox (make a backup of your configuration) and reïnstall it
I tried every possible thing I could do to fix Thunderbird or Firefox. But then again, why was Evolution suffering as well? Well the deal was that I had WINS resolution enabled in Samba. Found it in this bug report.
When upgrading to 8.10, Samba was upgraded too. This bug has been reported and hopefully will be solved in Ubuntu 9.04, launching 23rd of April.
So how do we fix this?
Enter this in your console:
sudo nano /etc/nsswitch.conf
And look for a line like this:
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] wins dns mdns4
Change it into
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
and everything should go back to normal.
However the WINS resolution is a good tool in Samba. I don’t really need it, because I don’t have the need to use a local network with Windows computers, but I can imagine it’s not that pleasant for people who do. Downgrading your Samba (or Ubuntu) is another option.
WINS resolution is used to communicate to Windows computers using their computer name, rather than their IP.
That’s it!
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