Selenium not opening virtual browser window on Linux

Question

Hello all,

I am using Selenium to conduct user interface tests with JUnit, in a Maven project. The project is located on a Linux box running IEs4Linux and Wine to allow us to run the tests in IE.

Right now I'm using Xming along with Putty to view the virtual browser windows, and I am able to open an IE window with the command "ie6", and I can see it functioning correctly in Xming.

When setting up the Selenium RC using the *iexplore browser mode, I get the following in the RC server window:

INFO - Command request: getNewBrowserSession[*iexplore, http://asdfasdfasdf.com:7011/, ] on session null
INFO - creating new remote session
INFO - Allocated session asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfadsf for http://asdfasdfasdf.com:7011/, launching...
INFO - Launching Embedded Internet Explorer...
INFO - Launching Internet Explorer HTA...

Which is normal, except the browser never opens and the tests never run. Using *iexploreproxy or *piiexplore, I get the following error from the RC:

13:46:06.957 INFO - Got result: Failed to start new browser session: org.openqa.selenium.server.browserlaunchers.WindowsUtils$WindowsRegistryException: Problem while managing the registry, OS Version '2.6.18-164.11.1.el5', regVersion1 = null on session null

Is there any reason Selenium would fail to launch the IE window using *iexplore? I would use *firefox or *chrome but the application I am testing is only compatible with IE. Also note that these test cases run perfectly fine on my local Windows machine.

Please let me know if you need more details.

Answer 1

Got it working...in case anybody else attempts to use a similar configuration to mine...for whatever reason it seems you cannot start up the server with the Http.proxyName and Http.proxyPort settings when using IEs4Linux to open IE6...it will just ignore them. You have to manually open the IE6 browser and enter the proxy settings yourself (most likely localhost and 4444).

I think I'll start looking into IE7 for Linux...apparently IE6 doesn't like Selenium's use of XPaths.