watch out for Ubuntu updates!

I saw updates were ready for my ubuntu eeepc, so I downloaded them as usual yesterday. When I got back from shopping, one piece had not updated properly, but I gave it no notice, and followed the recommendation for rebooting.

And then, my firefox wouldn't work. At All! I could click on it, it would give me the little clockface symbol (like the annoying microsoft hourglass it mimics, its appearance is often bad news). And nothing, no window, no nuthin. A reboot didn't help.

Since I couldn't search the web to find an answer, and I verified my connection to internet was working (in fact, I could get and send email, but still no web browsing), I decided to try the ubuntu software center.

I tried to unload firefox in order to reload a fresh copy. That didn' t work at all. I tried Synaptic Package Manager to reload firefox, and it gave me errors. Most of the errors were with xulrunner, and I tried to redownload it as well, and the errors persisted.

Finally, I had to remove firefox, all its subcomponents like ubufox and branding, and xulrunner.
Then I went to the terminal prompt to do the command line: sudo apt get install firefox-3.5. With it came the ubufox, branding and xulrunner.
And it worked! Firefox now works again, even retaining my bookmarks and search history.

I don't know what went wrong other than I got a non-working xulrunner for some reason, but a fresh copy fixed it, as long as I removed the bad copy first.

Sudo - the command that does it all. Its as powerful as a sumo doing judo. Sudo.