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Asked: 2026-05-10T18:35:51+00:00

Question I have an application written in Java. It is designed to run on

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Question

I have an application written in Java. It is designed to run on a Linux box standalone. I am trying to spawn a new firefox window. However, firefox never opens. It always has a shell exit code of 1. I can run this same code with gnome-terminal and it opens fine.

Background

So, here is its initialization process:

  1. Start X ‘Xorg :1 -br -terminate -dpms -quiet vt7’
  2. Start Window Manager ‘metacity –display=:1 –replace’
  3. Configure resources ‘xrdb -merge /etc/X11/Xresources’
  4. Become a daemon and disconnect from controlling terminal

Once the program is up an running, there is a button the user can click that should spawn a firefox window. Here is my code to do that. Remember X is running on display :1.

Code

 public boolean openBrowser() {   try {     Process oProc = Runtime.getRuntime().exec( '/usr/bin/firefox --display=:1' );     int bExit = oProc.waitFor();  // This is always 1 for some reason      return true;    } catch ( Exception e ) {     oLogger.log( Level.WARNING, 'Open Browser', e );     return false;   } }
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1 Answer

  1. after having read the various answers and various comments(from questioner), here’s what I would do

    1) try this java approach http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/ProcessBuilder.html

    ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder('myCommand', 'myArg1', 'myArg2'); Map<String, String> env = pb.environment(); env.put('VAR1', 'myValue'); env.remove('OTHERVAR'); env.put('VAR2', env.get('VAR1') + 'suffix'); pb.directory('myDir'); Process p = pb.start();

    see more about this class:

    http://java.sun.com/developer/JDCTechTips/2005/tt0727.html#2
    http://www.javabeat.net/tips/8-using-the-new-process-builder-class.html

    2) try doing this(launching firefox) from C/C++/ruby/python and see if that is succeeding.

    3) if all else fails, I would launch a shell program and that shell program would launch firefox!!

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