The firefox saga on openSUSE

Ahh what a pain!! I have been struggling to get firefox going on OpenSUSE for quite some time. The problem is that it(firefox) eats out 100% cpu and freeze it forever.So it hinders the productivity of mine heavily ,because I spent lot of time in the browser to do lot of day to day activity.At last I am able to figure out and solve the owes regarding that problem.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you.

The Solution:

The first step I took discard firefox and start using "swiftfox", which is specifically optimized to run on GNU/Linux and of course on specific processor!!!. You can have a look at it in the website http://www.getswiftfox.com.

Once it came up ,I create a new profile in it and install my fatty extension(around 57 of them) on it(all firefox extensions are compatible with it) one by one.You can find my extension for firefox in mozilla site by looking at this url : https://addons.mozilla.org/collection/unixbhaskar

Then I have created a small script to restrict the cpu usage of swiftfox by a specific limit with the help of a software called "cpulimit",which can be found here : http://cpulimit.sourceforge.net/ . So the next step to call it when the swiftfox start. So here is small snippet of code will do that:

#!/bin/bash
2
3 if [[ `ps -ef | grep swiftfox-bin` ]]
4 then
5 echo "swiftfox is running."
6 `/usr/local/bin/cpulimit -e swiftfox-bin -l 70`&
7 echo "limiting the cpu usage by 70%"
8
9 fi

So I have restricted swiftfox to 70% of cpu usage.So it will never utilise more then that cpu usage power.

Now it's running fine on OpenSUSE11.1 with latest kernel-2.6.31.3 .

At last some respite :)

Bhaskar Chowdhury

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