It looks like the file that Selenium is identifying as your firefox executable (/usr/bin/firefox-bin, or whatever that links to) is not a binary file, but a script. Selenium expects to find the binary file itself, and refuses to launch Firefox from a script. The solution is to find where the actual binary file is (you can probably tell from reading script and seeing what it launches), and point Selenium at it by setting the browser to:

*firefox /path/to/the/real/binary

when you create your Selenium instance.

java.lang.RuntimeException: File was a script file, not a real executable: /usr/bin/firefox-bin

and the actual error from the attempted test run is:
http://pastebin.com/m265d6539

Any idea where I should get started? It’s definitely some sort of a setup issue - not a code bug (I have the same exact test running just fine on my not-so-headless ubuntu box). So, something with the environment vars? Or finding and moving the firefox binary somewhere else?

I’m glad someone found this post useful :). I was lucky as using the environment was natural in Pulse so I never considered an alternative.

I’ve been messing around for an hour now trying to figure out how to pass a –display=xx option to Firefox from Selenium in order to get the damned thing running headless. Cheers for reminding me of the obvious!