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 1

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.