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: When using the Mozilla HTML rendering widget the focus is always moved to the HTML widget. This is really disturbing!
  A: First this is a Mozilla behaviour and no Liferea bug. If you want to get this fixed please vote on these Mozilla bugs: #210373 and #226708.
Q: Liferea is buggy! It does not close when I click on the window managers close button and the tray icon is activated.
  A: We see this as a useful feature and not as a bug. The idea is that the GUI consists of two interfaces both serving different usage modes of the program. Requesting a close for one these interfaces does not mean the whole thing - the program - is terminated. Closing the window means "closing the window" for Liferea. It does not mean "ending the application".
  There are several other applications following the same approach: MS Outlook, licq, akregator, gaim, mail notification...
  If you really don't like this behaviour please disable the tray icon.
Q: I want cookies!
  A: Liferea supports cookies provided by a text file ~/.liferea/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 stylesheets. Just place a liferea.css (for the two pane view) or a liferea2.css (for the three pane view) into ~/.liferea. These will be loaded additionally to the default stylesheets so you can modify some or all style definitions. To learn about the styles have a look at the default stylesheets in <install root>/share/liferea/css.
Q: How can I subscribe to Gmails inbox feed?
  A: Google provides a Atom feed with a list of all new messages under https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom. Because this feed is accessed via HTTPS is not directly supported by Liferea. You need an external download tool (e.g. curl or wget) to subscribe to this feed. To do so open the new subscription dialog select command as source type and enter the following command as feed source:
  `curl -s -u username:password https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom`
  Substitute username and password with your Gmail login information.
Q: I really need to subscribe to HTTPS feeds! But Liferea doesn't support this.
  A: Liferea does not support HTTPS. Currently there are no plans to do so. This won't change as there are almost no feeds using HTTPS out there. But if you really need to there is a simple trick to do so. Open the new subscription dialog and select the source type "command". Don't enter a source but enable the "Use conversion filter" option and enter "curl <your-HTTPS-URL>" as conversion command. Obviously to make this work you need curl or any other program which supports downloads with output to stdout. This hint was contributed by Norbert Kiesel.
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: What is the difference between a folder and a directory?
  A: Folders are used to group feeds in a feedlist. Directories are lists of feeds that are added to your feedlist and are treated very similar to how feeds are treated. Directories are stored in OCS or OPML format.
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!