(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

For 12 months I had been happily using http://grooveshark.com without an account. (That site lets you search for music and play it, like a juke box.) Then, some weeks back I must have inadvertently done something to my browser (Firefox 14.0.1) because the grooveshark page changed to some useless text-only thing where nothing works. http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/1291/groovee.jpg If I click on anything there, it simply redraws the page; I can't even search for music, let alone play it.

When Firefox 15.0.1 was released I immediately updated hoping this would fix things, but grooveshark is still unusable. Any ideas on fixing it? I have cleared the cache and cookies, to no effect. I have checked my user agent header, and it is very properly Firefox. Javascript is enabled.

(In case this sounds vaguely familiar to you, some months back I managed to do the same with facebook—it went from the normal site to a text-only useless page and no one was able to come up with a fix. It is still unusable.)

The wierd thing is that I installed Opera, and guess what? It renders grooveshark as the same useless non-functioning text screen! If I run a pristine puppy from the CD I do get the correct rendering of the fully functional grooveshark site.

I'd really like this fixed.

have you installed flash? as i think the site uses a lot of it. if you have installed flash, make sure you're not blocking it with any addons such as flashblock etc

666philb wrote:have you installed flash?

Youtube works. Flash is not blocked.

Can you take a screenshot of that text-only screen showing something besides a blank screen, and post it here? (Crop it or otherwise limit its width to 600 pixels or less, so the forum will show it.)

Try a force-reload of the pages (Shift+Reload).

(Note: Don't confuse this with a normal/regular reload. A force-reload will force Firefox to reload the entire page from the server, rather than pull anything from a cache, which can help when cached/often-visited pages aren't displaying correctly, or have somehow become corrupted.)

Are you sure you haven't inadvertently set the browsers to operate through any sort of proxy, or useragent, that might somehow be convincing the sites you're accessing them through a mobile device (or something like that)?

Is it so that using older version of flash does not fix the problem anymore ?
http://208.109.22.214/puppy/viewtopic.p ... fc7#643756

Grooveshark need flash 9 or newer so there is several to test for. As you have noticed, with Pentium III the newer libflashplayer.so versions might not be compatible.

Have you tried to clear the cache from firefox ?

would backup your .mozilla directory into a clickable .sfs , not loadable .sfs .
Then run to delete the .mozilla directory .
Then run to create everything new .

Flash wrote:Can you take a screenshot of that text-only screen showing something besides a blank screen, and post it here? (Crop it or otherwise limit its width to 600 pixels or less, so the forum will show it.)

Does the link to that very thing in my first post not work for you?

Makoto wrote:Are you sure you haven't inadvertently set the browsers to operate through any sort of proxy, or useragent, that might somehow be convincing the sites you're accessing them through a mobile device (or something like that)?

I do change the user agent for a particular site, but that was the first thing I checked at http://whatsmyuseragent.com/ and useragent is right.

Hi Shep,

Have you tried clicking on the words shown in that pic: "Close Lightbox"? If so, what were the results from that?

See, some websites offer up a "lite-weight version" of themselves which will load quickly into a browser - some people chose to do this back when I did webhosting on my servers a few years back.

I'm wondering whether or not you might be seeing the same thing with FaceBook as well somehow and if they're offering you somewhere an "unfamilar choice" to click out of the "simple/fast-loading version" which has yet to have been found?

And in some unknown way these lite-weight versions have been set as "defaults" by your Firefox? There is a way to go into the browser's settings to clear just how it views individual website settings. Hmm... you may find these under "Edit>preferences>Advanced>Network ( tab )" and underneath one of those buttons on the right?

Just another idea to throw into the fray. Of course I could also be all wet behind the ears too.

Good luck my fellow Puppian friend and please keep us posted, would you? We'd appreciate knowing how this was solved. ( I sure would! )

Cheers/Amicalement,

Eyes-Only
"L'Peau-Rouge d'Acadie"

Eyes-Only wrote:Have you tried clicking on the words shown in that pic: "Close Lightbox"? If so, what were the results from that?

Nothing happens. It's not clickable.

But good thinking.

And in some unknown way these lite-weight versions have been set as "defaults" by your Firefox? There is a way to go into the browser's settings to clear just how it views individual website settings. Hmm... you may find these under "Edit>preferences>Advanced>Network ( tab )" and underneath one of those buttons on the right?

There's nothing there relating to individual sites.

Shep wrote:Facebook looks like a text rendering.

It's mostly a text rendering. You can generate it for yourself on Firefox at any site, including http://www.grooveshark.com, with View > Page Style > No Style

Compare what you see with what I show below, they are very similar. Except with my browser generating this of its own accord, there are almost no clickable links. Maybe this gives someone a hint?

.

Hmmm. Interesting. It could be even savefile corruption which is behind this.
I get savefile problems infrequently with transmission. Even though I download the big video file outside of the savefile, sometimes savefile has been still eaten away. I have even tried to hunt if there is some big file lurking somewhere. None of file size listings in command line show anything big enough to eat 1 Gb savefile away. It is just eaten away. Got that one with the savefile I am using now. 900 Mb was eaten during download. This problem has followed me infrequently non dependent of Transmission version. Sometimes curious things just happens....like problem with savefile. That is one reason I dont use same savefile very long.
Lobster has reported same problem some time ago with Transmission and Puppy.

pemasu wrote:Hmmm. Interesting. It could be even savefile corruption which is behind this.

You could be right. I do have to keep increasing savefile by 100 or 200 MB every month or so. (Nevertheless, I can't discount the suspicion that it is to do with my temporary setting of user-agent to resemble iphone. The fact that no one else seems to be having this trouble would correlate with similar low numbers who would be resetting user-agent.)

It would be a lot more convenient to keep user-installed software outside the savefile if PPM asked a simple question before installing: "Where would you like PPM to install this? In the save file, or select a directory (e.g., /mnt/sda6/bin)". As it stands, the user is given no indication where software is being installed.

Hey Shep- have you been trying their site with extensions enabled?

If yes- do the obvious.

If no- backup your *.default profile and reinstall (FF)..

Pending the above, I'd most likely run fsck.

pemasu wrote:Hmmm. Interesting. It could be even savefile corruption which is behind this.
I get savefile problems infrequently with transmission. Even though I download the big video file outside of the savefile, sometimes savefile has been still eaten away. I have even tried to hunt if there is some big file lurking somewhere. None of file size listings in command line show anything big enough to eat 1 Gb savefile away. It is just eaten away. Got that one with the savefile I am using now. 900 Mb was eaten during download. This problem has followed me infrequently non dependent of Transmission version. Sometimes curious things just happens....like problem with savefile. That is one reason I dont use same savefile very long.
Lobster has reported same problem some time ago with Transmission and Puppy.

I would check /tmp then if the program makes a second file as immediate parallel backup there .

On the continual erosion of savefile free space......

I have preferences set to not report Crashes. Nevertheless, I just noticed a directory /root/.mozilla/firefox/Crash_Reports/pending which has 1250 files, half of them ~72kB. In one I read: Erasing these unwanted reports will free up more than 80MB.

Karl Godt wrote:

Code: Select all

mksquashfs /root/.mozilla /root/mozilla-quarantaine-2012-09-11.sfs

would backup your .mozilla directory into a clickable .sfs , not loadable .sfs .
Then run

Code: Select all

rm -rf /root/.mozilla

to delete the .mozilla directory .
Then run

Code: Select all

firefox 

to create everything new .

I hesitated to try this, not understanding exactly what it would do. But finally I gave it a go; it didn't work. and then I couldn't get the sfs loader to restore it.

So I started all over, creating a new savefile. As expected, grooveshark and facebook both work again with the new savefile. I downloaded just two add-ons, add blocker and a download helper, and restarted firefox to install them.

I had grooveshark playing in the background while I read through posts in this forum. I activated add blocker to get rid of that flash add at the top of the screen, and grooveshark stopped playing. I returned to the grooveshark tab and it has turned into that text rendering, non-functional screen. Disabling the add-ons does not restore grooveshark to a functioning state; it looks like I'm going to have to start over yet again — apparently the damage has been done. So I think I might be narrowing down the problem, looks like an add-on incompatability.

Follow-up: I believe I have identified the cause, in a word it's the file /etc/hosts.

Rather than try and identify which one of the thousands of those junk URLs is demanded by facebook, I just rename that file prior to going to facebook (about twice a month), then rename it back once I'm there.