Liferea FAQ

| Liferea - Frequently Asked Questions |

Note: This FAQ is also available online.

Q: Where can I get it?
  A: The easiest way is to download the source package or one of the available binary packages from the SourceForge project homepage. But you should also consider checking if your Linux distribution provides an own package for Liferea. A list of all known prebuilt packages is provided in the installation section.
Q: Security and Liferea
  A: Liferea might be quite functional but is not the best choice when you consider security to be very important. There are some points you should know:
  - When using feed or proxy authentication usernames and passwords are saved plain text in ~/.liferea/feedlist.opml. File Permissions: 0600.
  - The ~/.liferea directory depending on the users umask can be readable for everyone. This is useful to allow other programs access to the new_subscription pipe.
  - The cache directory with the feed contents is user readable only. Contents are stored as plain text in XML.
  - The Mozilla profile used by Liferea is created once according to the users umask setting. This is true for other temporary files too.
  - The Mozilla profile is created on first startup and is a practically unconfigured Mozilla profile! This can be a significant security problem (Javascript, Software Installation, Plugins...). A workaround for this is to replace it with a profile from a securily configured Mozilla installation.
  - This list may not be complete!
Q: Liferea is buggy! It does not close when I click on the window managers close button and the tray icon is activated.
  A: There are quite different opinions about the best behaviour for the tray icon behaviour. The default setting in Liferea is to hide the window as many (but not all) other programs with tray icons do. If you do not like this you can change the behaviour in the preferences.
Q: I want cookies!
  A: Liferea supports cookies provided by a text file ~/.liferea_1.2/cookies.txt which contains cookies in Netscape format. The easiest way is to copy the file from your Mozilla profile after you created the cookies with the browser.
Q: I don't like the HTML styles Liferea uses!
  A: You can have your own stylesheet. Just place a liferea.css into ~/.liferea_1.4/. During startup it will be loaded additionally to the default stylesheet so you can modify some or all style definitions. To learn about the styles have a look at the default stylesheet in <install root>/share/liferea/css.
Q: The Mozilla browser module doesn't work for me!
  A: Please check:
  - You need the full Mozilla suite to run the Mozilla module. Firefox doesn't work for that purpose. Note that you can have both installed, browse the web with Firefox and use Mozilla just as Liferea's module
  - If you have any Mozilla installation containing `libgtkembedmoz.so`. It won't work without this library.
  - The debug output of Liferea (try running with --debug-all) for Mozilla related errors. If you get `libgtkembedmoz.so: cannot open shared object file` the library simply cannot be found. So you need to set `MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME` to the installation path of Liferea. If for example Mozilla was installed in `/usr/local/mozilla-1.7` and you use bash you should add `export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/local/mozilla-1.7` to your `.profile`.
  - If your Liferea installation was compiled with Mozilla support. In case you did compile yourself you can check this in the summary output of `configure`. Note that some distributions like Debian split the Liferea package into several parts. To use Liferea with Mozilla on a Debian installation you need the packages `liferea` and `liferea-mozilla`
  If none of the above could solve your problems. Please try to use Liferea with another Mozilla installation. Between some Mozilla versions there are symbol incompatibilities. As a last resort you can fallback to GtkHTML2. If you have crashes or other problems please contacts us at the mailing list.
Q: How do I see my LiveJournal friend's friends-only entries?
  A: Use the authenticated LiveJournal RSS feed. For example use http://www.livejournal.com/users/pigrew/data/rss?auth=digest. You will need to use the feed properties dialog box to set the username and password of your LiveJournal account.
Q: Why do feed items keep being displayed as new?
  A: This is usually due to a bad feed which associated a particular ID to multiple items. You should check your feed against a feed validator such as feedvalidator.org. If the validator does not report any error, please submit a bug report including the URL of the problem feed to the Liferea bugtracker.
  Note: If you experience this problem with a planet feed the reason might be that the planet feed does not provide unique item ids for one or all off its source feeds. If this is the case Liferea has no chance to match identical items.
Q: Liferea crashes too much.
  A: We hear this complaint a lot, but we rarely do not get information on how it crashed. If you find a way to make Liferea crash, we would love to know about it. Please send us a copy of the output of running Liferea with the "--debug-all" flag, plus a backtrace if possible. To create a backtrace, open up a terminal and type two commands: ulimit -c unlimited and then liferea. This causes Liferea to create a core dump when it crashes. Then, run gdb liferea-bin core and type bt at the gdb prompt. This will display the backtrace of the crash, which should be sent along with the bug report.
Q: Why doesn't Liferea have feature X?
  A: Please submit a feature request to our RFE tracker!