a little madness

Ubuntu 8.04, the Hardy Heron, was released last week. I eagerly upgraded to see if my previous wireless networking issues had been resolved, and joy of joys they had! This allowed me to finally switch back to Ubuntu as my primary development environment.

Most of the switch went without a hitch, however I did encounter one problem. The acceptance tests for Pulse rely heavily on Selenium. When trying to launch Selenium on Hardy, Selenium RC always got stuck at:

Preparing Firefox profile…

The default version of Firefox installed with Hardy is Firefox 3 beta 5 - as opposed to Firefox 2 in previous releases. So it seems that Selenium and Firefox 3 don’t agree with each other - or at least not when using the current release of Selenium (1.0-b1). My best guess is that Selenium is trying to install extensions into Firefox but is failing as the compatible versions for the extensions don’t include Firefox 3. A better diagnostic would be nice!

In any case, the easiest resolution was to install Firefox 2, which can sit alongside Firefox 3 on Hardy. Just install the firefox-2 package:

Then make sure Selenium uses this version. One way to do this is to create a link named firefox-bin in your PATH that points to the Firefox 2 binary. However, I prefer to leave my system clean and make an exception just for Selenium. To allow this, our tests support an optional SELENIUM_BROWSER environment variable that specifies in Selenium format the browser to use (this comes in handy in other cases too). So before running tests, I ensure that SELENIUM_BROWSER is set:

To make this my default with no extra effort, I have actually just added it to my .bashrc.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 5:31 am and is filed under Testing, Agile, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.