Problem : Online Help not accessible from the Help > Help Contents menu


Environment : Linux*/IA32, Intel® 64


Problem Description and Solutions:
When opening the Intel® IDB Debugger On-line Help from the Help > Help Contents menu you may encounter one of the following issues which are caused by a missing symbolic link to your web browser or by any misconfiguration on the system:


1) You may receive the message 'unable to open web browser on {0}'

Solution: Create a symbolic link 'mozilla' to the Firefox Browser. This is done as follows, for example:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/mozilla
   or (if you do not have sudo root rights)
$ ln -s /usr/bin/firefox <user_dir>/mozilla


2) Firefox tries to open URL http://172.0.0.1:<id>/help/index.jsp and after some time a 'Network Error (tcp_error)' appears.

Solution: Add IP address 127.0.0.1 to the list of Ignored Hosts in the Network Proxy Settings.


3) An error /libswt-mozilla-gcc3-gtk-3235.so: undefined symbol: _ZN4nsID5ParseEPKc appears.
The root cause may be a system configuration issue with Firefox and the xulrunner runtime.

Solution: Try one of the following:

- Create an environment variable that points to the xulrunner installation, for example:
$ export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib64/xulrunner-sdk-1.9
$ ln -s /usr/bin/firefox /usr/local/bin/mozilla

- Create an environment variable that points to the browser directory, for example:
$ export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox-3.5.7

- Install the full xulrunner-devel package to solve the 'undefined symbol' error, for example:
$ sudo apt-get install xulrunner-devel