I’m writing about Eee PC right now, and after updating a clean install (no added repositories) was surprised to find Firefox failing with a segmentation fault. Clicking the Firefox icon did nothing. Running from a console got this:

/opt/firefox/run-mozilla.sh: line 131: nnnn Segmentation fault

Reinstalling Firefox and deleting the profile did not work, nor did safe mode. I found the answer here. Open a console (Control-Alt-T) and type:

sudo apt-get install eeepc-updatepack-20071126

What does this package do?

This update pack fixes SCIM for applications which were provided to ASUS as binaries. This includes Firefox, Thunderbird, Adobe Acrobat.

SCIM is the Smart Common Input Method platform.

All is now well, but I’m not impressed. Running apt-get update and then apt-get upgrade should not break important applications. Nor is it obvious how to fix the problem. This kind of thing will put new users off Linux; not good if Asus really wants to make the Eee a mass-market device.

Incidentally, if you are stuck without Firefox on the Eee and need to browse the web, typing konqueror from a console will fire up the KDE web browser.