• CommonProblems

Common Problems

• Conkeror fails to start, and there is no error message of any kind

  • This can be caused by a corrupt or out-of-date profile. Delete your ~/.conkeror.mozdev.org/ directory.

• Error spawning process: conkeror-spawn-helper not found; try running "make"

  • In order to use external editing, you need conkeror's conkeror-spawn-helper installed. If you installed conkeror manually, you just need to run make in its base directory. If you installed conkeror from your operating system, there is likely a package available for conkeror-spawn-helper. In Debian and Ubuntu for example, you need to install the package conkeror-spawn-process-helper.

• When downloading something, both the Conkeror download manager and the Mozilla download manager pop up

  • This is a problem having to do with XPCOM registration. Delete the following files from your profile directory so they can be automatically recreated: xpti.data, compreg.dat, XPC.mfasl.

• Conkeror always starts in offline mode

  • This problem may appear in Debian systems and a workaround for it consists in removing the network-manager package. Alternatively adding the following to your .conkerorrc will also avoid it:

    io_service.manageOfflineStatus = false;
    io_service.offline = false;

  • Also note the interactive commands:

    network-go-online
    network-go-offline

• Limitations of MIME type overriding

  • The view-as-mime-type command (bound to v by default) as well as the "view internally" and "view as text" options in the download prompt depend on a facility in Conkeror known as MIME type overriding. Unfortunately, this facility is implemented in a somewhat hacky way, due largely to limitations in Mozilla, and as a result has the following limitations:

  • Only HTTP and HTTPS URLs are supported
  • In some cases the MIME type that Mozilla guesses from the content stream (so-called content sniffing) will take precedence over any override MIME type that is specified. Fortunately, I believe in all such cases the internal viewer (Gecko) will not be able to handle the content usefully anyway.
  • The URL will be re-requested from the server (any cached version will be discarded), and the resulting content will be stored in the cache with the overridden MIME type.
  • If the "view internally" or "view as text" options are used from the download prompt, the existing request will be aborted and a new GET request for the same URL will be generated. Consequently, these download options will probably not work correctly for POST requests.

• Shift-insert does not work when the primary selection was set by the xclip program

  • There seems to be a problem in mozilla, or possibly xclip, such that mozilla doesn't see data that xclip places in the primary selection buffer. The work-around is to use xsel instead of xclip, if possible.

    If you use xclip.el in emacs, you can override the function xclip-set-selection with the following version, to set the selection with xsel instead of xclip:

    (defun xclip-set-selection (type data)
      "TYPE is a symbol: primary, secondary and clipboard.
    
    Use xsel instead of xclip.  Just a hack.
    
    See `x-set-selection'."
      (when (and xclip-program (getenv "DISPLAY"))
        (let* ((process-connection-type nil)
               (proc (start-process "xclip" nil "xsel" "-i"
                                    (if (eq type 'clipboard) "-b" "-p"))))
          (process-send-string proc data)
          (process-send-eof proc))))

• Conkeror fails to run external program on finished download

  • For a possible explanation see Issue 114. The upshot of the discussion there is that changing the value of browser.download.manager.retention to 1 or 2 may resolve the problem. See this page for details of this preference.