Cannot get portable app to run

[VA1DER]

Palemoon Portable 32.5.1 will not run on a particular Windows 10 Enterprise work computer when executed through the portable launcher. Palemoon itself will run if I drill down and execute the binary directly, but running the portable launcher has no effect. There is no message box, window, or message. The program executes and immediately terminates. I have run it through the command line and it still immediately exits with no console messages.

It is unknown whether this is related to any security currently on the the computer. Are there any command-line switches that can be used to cause it to create a log or be verbose? As there is absolutely no interaction when launcher is run, I'm at a loss for further debugging. I don not have access to the event log on this computer.

Operating system: Windows 10 Enterprise
Browser version: Palemoon Portable 32.5.1
32-bit or 64-bit browser?: 64
Problem URL: Nil
Browser theme (if not default): N/A
Installed add-ons: N/A
Installed plugins: (about:plugins): N/A

[therube]

Given that "palemoon.exe" does run & that "Palemoon-Portable.exe" does not,
if you were to rename "Palemoon-Portable.exe" to "palemoon.exe"
- better, to make a copy of Palemoon-Portable.exe & rename that copy to palemoon.exe,
with that renamed "palemoon.exe", does that run & start PaleMoon?

To do this, you would actually need to also make a copy of Palemoon-Portable.ini & rename that to "palemoon.ini".
(I.e., the name of the renamed .exe needs to have a correspondingly named .ini.)


And in that respect, so long as you are running the correct "palemoon.exe (that being the one NOT in the /bin/ directory), you are then in fact running "Portable". You can confirm that in Task Manager (or similar) where you should see two "palemoon.exe", with 1 being the the "loader", using ~5 MB of RAM & the other being /bin/palemoon.exe, the actual PaleMoon .exe (& likewise Profile data should be updated within the /User/ directory tree).

[Moonchild]

It's possible that your endpoint security is interfering, e.g. by not allowing the program to write to the portable location's profile. If you launch palemoon.exe instead of palemoon-portable.exe, the location used for the profile will be the standard %APPDATA% user folder, and the result will not be portable.

[VA1DER]

Thank-you for the tips. I had already renamed the launcher to try and diagnose to no effect. I did it again just now, duplicating the palemoon.exe filename, with no change.

I have tried moving the portable folder structure to various places. I tried it off my desktop, \temp and even in \appdata\roaming\Moonchild Productions\ since without the launcher the real palemoon.exe can clearly write there. I have write access, of course, everywhere I tried it, so the launcher process should have write access as well. I can verify that the launcher runs very briefly, as I can see it occasionally flicker on the the process list in task manager. So the launcher executable isn't being blocked. I can run other various executables in the launcher folder in every place I have tried it, including executables that write to the directory where they run from.

Is there any way to get the launcher to output error states to a log or message box?

[gepus]

The screenshot was taken on Win7 where Pale Moon Portable works faultlessly.
Hence only a wild guess and it could be wrong:

EDIT:
My wild guess was wrong.
It's my my Win7 lacking update.

[therube]

Does anything at all get written to User/Palemoon/Profiles/Default ?
Or is the Default directory even created, touched?


@G, maybe you're missing on update on your Win7 (dealing with sha-2 / sha256)?
.
Win7 x64:

Palemoon 32.5.1 Digital Signature OK.png

[gepus]

@G, maybe you're missing on update on your Win7 (dealing with sha256)?

You're right! This is the reason.

[VA1DER]

Does anything at all get written to User/Palemoon/Profiles/Default ?
Or is the Default directory even created, touched?

Nothing is written. Nothing is touched. It looks like it isn't even trying to read the .ini file, since I can delete it and there is no effect. It doesn't give me an error dialog when the .ini file is missing, like it does on other computers.

Firefox Portable will run just fine, and it works in much the same way, but I really don't want to have to use it. Firefox is lousy with trackers and phone home shite you can't turn off.

[Moonchild]

Well if something simply terminated the launcher right away then there's no way to use it. May want to look into whatever security software might be interfering, because some of them do not like x-launcher or anything compiled with AutoIT. There really is nothing much else to suggest at this point if it doesn't even get to reading the ini, as it means its execution is being stopped very early.

[VA1DER]

x-launcher or anything compiled with AutoIT

I didn't realize the launcher was an AutoIT compiled script. A lot of stuff marks AutoIT as a trojan just on general principles. In this case, though, my suspicion is something else. My account is a domain account and my home directory is on a network asset. If it's a compiled AutoIT script then it is looking to drop the script to a temp file and execute it. I bet it's having troubles with that.

Is the script also open source? If so I'll see if I can get it to work manually.

[Kris_88]

Is the script also open source? If so I'll see if I can get it to work manually.

You can try a batch file, which does almost the same thing as the standard launcher.
Create a "pm.cmd" file in the same folder:

Code: Select all

@echo off
set ABS_PATH=%~dp0
set USER_JS=%ABS_PATH%%USERNAME%\Palemoon\Profiles\Default\user.js

IF NOT EXIST "%ABS_PATH%Bin\Palemoon\palemoon.exe" EXIT

IF EXIST "%USER_JS%" goto skip1
md "%ABS_PATH%%USERNAME%\Palemoon\Profiles\Default"
echo user_pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", false); >"%USER_JS%"
echo user_pref("plugin.expose_full_path", true); >>"%USER_JS%"
echo user_pref("extensions.enabledScopes", 5); >>"%USER_JS%"
echo user_pref("browser.download.useDownloadDir", false); >>"%USER_JS%"
echo user_pref("browser.download.manager.retention", 1); >>"%USER_JS%"
echo user_pref("browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser", false); >>"%USER_JS%"
echo user_pref("browser.taskbar.lists.enabled", false); >>"%USER_JS%"
echo user_pref("app.update.auto", false); >>"%USER_JS%"
echo user_pref("app.update.enabled", false); >>"%USER_JS%"
echo user_pref("browser.cache.disk.parent_directory", "%ABS_PATH:\=\\%%USERNAME%\\Palemoon\\Profiles\\Default"); >>"%USER_JS%"
echo user_pref("browser.download.lastDir", "%ABS_PATH:\=\\%Downloads"); >>"%USER_JS%"
echo user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://start.palemoon.org"); >>"%USER_JS%"
:skip1

set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
set MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH=%ABS_PATH%Lib\Mozilla\Plugins;%ABS_PATH%Lib\Java\bin\new_plugin
set MOZ_PROFILE_PATH=%ABS_PATH%%USERNAME%\Palemoon\Profiles\Default

start "PM Portable" "%ABS_PATH%bin\palemoon\palemoon.exe" -profile "%MOZ_PROFILE_PATH%"

[Moonchild]

A lot of stuff marks AutoIT as a trojan just on general principles.

The launcher is codesigned and has not changed for years. Even if something would normally trip over it, it would already have been whitelisted a long time ago. So it's quite possible your networking problem is what is the case here. Using a batch file as Kris indicated would be a good alternative.

The script itself is an almost-verbatim copy of x-launcher (WinPenPack). I only made minor changes to cater specifically to launching Pale Moon, and to have its own application icon.

[therube]

My account is a domain account and my home directory is on a network asset.

I'm not really familiar with that, but does that mean that your PC is (kind of) acting like a "dumb terminal"?
And in that regard, are your running PM "from the network", or are you running PM "locally" & its' "data" is accessed across the network?

If the latter, if you change the Profile location (in PM Portable) to your local disk, does that allow Palemoon-Portable.exe to run?

Something like, Palemoon-Portable.ini:

Code: Select all

;(profile path)
MOZ_PROFILE_PATH=$Home$\$AppName$\Profiles\$Profile$
to
;(profile path)
MOZ_PROFILE_PATH=C:\LocalProfile\$Profile$

(

Portable

Depending on what you're looking for regarding "Portable"...

I do not know what Palemoon Portable does, particularly, but, if your intent is that it does not touch the Windows Registry [in addition to other reasons one may want a "portable" for], then note that the batch file method would not accomplish that.
)