Cannot create browser process when using selenium from python on RHEL5
Question: I'm trying to use selenium from python but I'm having a problem running it on
a RHEL5.5 server. I don't seem to be able to really start firefox.

    
    
    from selenium import webdriver
    b = webdriver.Firefox()
    

On my laptop with ubuntu this works fine and it starts a brings up a firefox
window. When I log in to the server with ssh I can run firefox from the
command line and get it displayed on my laptop. It is clearly firefox from the
server since it has the RHEL5.5 home page.

When I run the python script above on the server it (or run it in ipython) the
script hangs at webdriver.Firefox()

I have also tried

    
    
    from selenium import webdriver
    fb = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
    fb.native_events_enabled=True
    b=webdriver.Firefox(fb)
    

Which also hangs on the final line there.

I'm using python2.7 installed in /opt/python2.7. In installed selenium with
/opt/python2.7/pip-2.7.

I can see the firefox process on the server with top and it is using a lot of
CPU. I can also see from /proc/#/environ that the DISPLAY is set to
localhost:10.0 which seems right.

How can I get a browser started with selenium on RHEL5.5? How can I figure out
why Firefox is not starting?


Answer: It looks like the problem I'm encountering is this selenium bug:
<http://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=2852>

I used the fix described in comment #9
<http://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=2852#c9>

That worked for me.

