Liferea FAQ

| Liferea - Frequently Asked Questions |

Note: This FAQ is also available online.

Q: Why doesn't Flash work (anymore)?
  A: Easy flash support broke when Liferea 1.10 which uses GTK3 is used with WebkitGTK3 versions before 2.0. For a detailed explanation read this post.
  There are the following known workarounds:
  1. Upgrade WebkitGTK3 to 2.0 or later
  2. Install nspluginwrapper and the 32bit flash plugin (instructions)
Q: Where can I get it?
  A: The easiest way is to download the source package from the GitHub project page. 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: Enclosures download with Gwget doesn't work
  A: Most likely you have Gwget 1.0.0 or 1.0.1 installed, and due to a temporary breakage in the dbus API of Gwget these versions don't work with Liferea. Both older and more recent versions of Gwget do work.
Q: I'm using Firefox/Seamonkey, and when opening items in the browser the focus goes to the browser.
  A: That's done by your browser. For changing it, open `about:config` in your browser and set `browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground` to true.
Q: Liferea is buggy! It does not close when I click on the window managers close button and the tray icon is activated.
  A: This is a pretty disputed topic. We see this as a useful feature, other people don't. If you don't like the behaviour you can change it in the preferences under "GUI". There you can enable the check box "Terminate instead of minimizing to tray icon".
Q: I want cookies!
  A: Liferea supports cookies provided by a text file ~/.config/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/CSS styles Liferea uses!
  A: You can have your own stylesheet. Just edit ~/.config/liferea/liferea.css During startup it will be loaded additionally to the default stylesheets so you can modify some or all style definitions. The file contains comments describing the different style so it should be easy to modify them.
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. If you are experienced with syndication formats please check the feed source code. If you find problems please contact the author/webmaster of the feed. If not please submit a bug report including the URL of the problem feed to the Liferea bug tracker.
  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 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: If you miss a feature in Liferea please consider contributing code to implement the feature! Please also consider that the Liferea project aims to provide a simple feed reader that might lack more complex functionality.
Q: What does "There were errors while parsing this feed!" mean and how can I fix it?
  A: The feed parser of Liferea expects valid XML. So, this error happens when a feed contains invalid XML. You can check the validity of a feed with http://feedvalidator.org/ and http://validator.w3.org/feed/.

  To fix this problem, you can try to sanitize the XML with xmllint. For this, open the subscription properties of the affected feed and add xmllint as a conversion filter in the source tab like this: xmllint --recover -

  Note: On Debian-based distribution xmllint is part of the libxml2-utils package.