Tag: bug reports

Linux: Two Scripts to Help Debug Opera

Are you an Opera user and a Linux user at the same time? If so, then you could genuinely help Opera by sending in bug reports and specifically crash reports.

I’ve put a could of tools together for you in the form of scripts. If the idea of scripts scares you, then don’t worry. I’ve explained how to use them in the INSTALL.txt file that is in the zip archives for each tool.

They are really easy to use and can make your life much easier!

If you find that these scripts could be improved and/or extended, feel free to make changes yourself and/or pass them my way so we can all benefit from them!

Opera: Kill Freeze – The first tool is a script that will stop Opera when it’s frozen and, if you are using Opera 10+, prompt you with a crash log report so you can explain how it happened.

Opera: Crash Report Details – This tool will generate a text file on your desktop with some technical specifics that you should copy and paste along with your bug report. This information can greatly help with finding a bug and reproducing it so that it can be eliminated.

Do you have or know of similar tools? Let me know about them and post them in the comments!

Crash logging Opera with Inspector IIXII for Linux

For those of you interested, I’ve spent a bit of my time trying to make your crashing logging life easier. 😉

After reading a post from csant‘s blog I decided to try to make the process of starting up Inspector a little less annoying by writing a Bourne shell script to automatically parse the PID and execute Inspector with the proper PID parameter for Opera.

After taking what csant had already posted (and is posted in a couple of other places) I just did a little extending that narrowed down the results to the correct one and parsed the second element divided by whitespace, which has to be the PID. It’s a fairly simple script. 😉

To get started crash logging Opera to help make it better all you need to do is download the Inspector program and create a new file named “inspectr.sh”.

Notice that I named it “inspectr” intentionally, as the linux program file is and has always been just “inspectr” so this helps keep confusion between file names down.

In the new shell file that you’ve created, copy and paste the following and save it.

#!/bin/sh

opera=`ps aux | grep opera$ | awk '{print $2}'`
if [ "$opera" != "" ]; then
./inspectr $opera
fi

After saving it, you’ll need to run the following to make it executable.

chmod +x inspectr.sh

Make sure that you saved both of the files together and also followed the instructions for setting up Inspector (really just chmod 755). After that you can just pop open a terminal, navigate to the inspector directory and run the following command to attach Inspector to the current running version of Opera.

./inspectr.sh

That’s about it! Collect those logs and make sure to send them with your bug reports!