Liferea FAQ

Scroll to top ↑Q: Why doesn't Liferea have feature X?
A: Please do NOT request new features! The project goal is to implement a simple feed reader. And you can be sure that the developer(s) will implement their own favourite features as soon as they have time to do so. If you really miss a feature please take the time to write a patch or even join the active development.
Scroll to top ↑Q: Where can I get the sources?
A: The easiest way is to download the source package from the SourceForge project homepage. If you are familiar with SVN you can also use the Liferea SVN repository provided by SourceForge. For instructions have a look at the SVN overview page at SourceForge.
Scroll to top ↑Q: Where can I get a pre-compiled binary?
A: We do not provide binaries, but a lot of different package maintainers do. To find out if your Linux distribution or Unix derivate provides an own package for Liferea have a look at the list of all known prebuilt packages in the installation section.
Scroll to top ↑Q: What does "Liferea" stand for and how do I spell it?
A: "Liferea" is the abbreviation for Linux Feed Reader. It doesn't really matter how you spell it. I sounds pretty strange when trying to pronounce it like an English word so I'd suggest to pronounce it like a Latin word.
Scroll to top ↑Q: How to use DBUS to automatically add subscriptions?
A: To add a feed using the DBUS subscription interface you can use the liferea-add-feed wrapper:
liferea-add-feed "http://feed.url.example.com/"
If you use Firefox 2 and newer you can use this script to configure Firefox to add new feed subscriptions directly to Liferea.
If you still use Firefox 1.5.x you can install theFeedBag extension to add subscriptions directly to Liferea. FeedBag does also use the liferea-add-feed script.
Scroll to top ↑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!
Scroll to top ↑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. This problem is fixed in recent Mozilla/Firefox/XulRunner releases.
Scroll to top ↑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 don't like this behaviour please have a look at the preferences. There you can configure the termination behaviour as you like.
Scroll to top ↑Q: I want cookies!
A: Liferea supports cookies provided by a text file ~/.liferea_1.4/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.
Scroll to top ↑Q: I don't like the HTML styles Liferea uses!
A: You can have your own stylesheet. Just place a liferea.css into ~/.liferea_1.4/. It 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 stylesheet in <install root>/share/liferea/css.
Scroll to top ↑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". You can simply subscribe to this URL and Liferea will pop up an authentication dialog where you need to supply your Gmail login information.
Note: Your password will be saved in plain text in ~/.liferea_1.4/feedlist.opml!
Scroll to top ↑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.
Scroll to top ↑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.
Scroll to top ↑Q: How do I subscribe to MySpace or Xanga feeds?
A: For MySpaces RSS feeds subscribe to

http://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=<friendID>

and for Xanga feeds subscribe to

http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=<username>
Scroll to top ↑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.
Scroll to top ↑Q: Liferea crashes too much.
A: We hear this complaint a lot, but we rarely do 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.