Getting Fennec 1.0b3 working on the N810

August 28, 2009

Back with version 1.0b2 of Fennec, I’ve tried using the browser on my N810. It would open, but when trying to access complex web pages (e.g., http://www.pbs.org), Fennec would crash. If I ran Fennec from the command line, I would get the following message:

pure virtual method called terminate called without active exception Aborted

When looking through Bugzilla, I found several similar Fennec issues (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=500766). I tried messing around with the debugging steps mentioned on that bug report to see if I could help with the problem, but I didn’t uncover any useful information. I also noticed some suggested patches that should be made to the “mobile.js” file that corrected some issues with caching and Maemo on the N810 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=448073). At that point, I was too lazy to see if patching the “mobile.js” file would help things. Also, the problem seemed to similar to other posted errors to be anything unique.

So just today (8/28/2009), I tried the 1.0b3 version of Fennec (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/fennec/1.0b3/releasenotes/). I still had the problem. I checked to see if “mobile.js” had been patched and it had, so it didn’t appear to be an issue with that particular problem alone. After a little more poking around, I noticed the following additional posted bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=511451 . In the end, enabling virtual memory made all of the difference for testing Fennec. It seems to function much better now, at least for sites like http://www.pbs.org/newshour .

Just thought I would record this somewhere.

Quick update (9/1/09):

Apparently there can be issues with using virtual memory on the N810. I had a similar issue with my N810. At first, I enabled virtual memory with a size of only 24 MB just to be conservative. Enabling virtual memory worked as did Fennec once virtual memory was enabled. I tried changing the size of the virtual memory to 128 MB and got errors saying that it couldn’t enable virtual memory, giving me a message like “Unable to create virtual memory”. At that point, no matter what size I chose for virtual memory, I couldn’t get virtual memory working again.

Eventually I came across the following solution: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=18043 . It comes down to a latent problem in the formatting of the internal 2GB memory card on the N810. If you back up the data from the internal card (/media/mmc2), reformat the card, and then restore the previous data, there is a good likelihood that you can get virtual memory working (assuming you have the space) through the Control Panel. It worked pretty smoothly for me. BTW, I tried the “File Manager” approach for reformatting since it was substantially easier and it worked just fine. The only odd thing that I remember from the whole process was that I have a few files that could not be backed up properly using “tar”, possibly due to the formatting problem. I ended up deleting them so that my “tar” archive would complete error free. Anyway, it might be worth a try to get virtual memory working on the N810.