Liferea FAQ

| Liferea - Frequently Asked Questions |

Note: This FAQ is also available online.

Q: Where can I get it?
  A: The easiest way is to download the source package from the SourceForge 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: 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 feed cache is saved in a binary database file.
  - This list may not be complete!
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 ~/.liferea_1.6/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 styles Liferea uses!
  A: You can have your own stylesheet. Just place a liferea.css into ~/.liferea_1.6/. During startup 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 stylesheets in <install root>/share/liferea/css.
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. 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.
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.