thunderbird does not start if user is not member of "wheel" group

[Bernt Hansson]

On 2016-01-24 12:11, Trust_No_1 via freebsd-questions wrote:
> Hello everybody.
> sorry for the stupid question, but I'm facing a strange (for me) problem.
> Let me explain:
> I have a nice FreeBSD workstation (running FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE-p10)
> that works very well for me.
>
> On this ws I have two users (say user1 and user2), but only one of them
> (user1) is in the wheel group.
> The second user is just in it's own group because I do not use it to
> administer the ws.
> So I have:
>
> root at dukefleed:~ # groups user1
> user1 wheel
>
> root at dukefleed:~ # groups user2
> users
>
> If I launch thunderbird with user1 all is OK but, if I try to start
> thunderbird as user2, I receive the following error:
>
> user2 at dukefleed:~ % thunderbird
> Could not find the Mozilla runtime.
>
> No matter if I try to launch it via the full path, cd into
> /usr/local/bin,... it does not start.
>
> The problem disappear if I add user2 to the wheel group.
> Providing that I could add user2 to the wheel group and solve the
> problem, I would like to know why I have this behavior.
>
> By the way: on the same ws, firefox DOES start without problems for both
> the two users, and in particular (for user2) it starts even if I do NOT
> add it to the wheel group.
>
> Sorry but I googled a lot without finding any link to a solution...
>
> Do you have any ideas?
>
> I use thunderbird 38.5.0
>
> Thank you very much and kind regards.
>
> Mauro.
>
This is from my testbox

bernt at testbox:~ % whereis thunderbird
thunderbird: /usr/local/bin/thunderbird /usr/ports/mail/thunderbird

bernt at testbox:~ % file /usr/local/bin/thunderbird
/usr/local/bin/thunderbird: symbolic link to 
/usr/local/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird