title: Selenium Standalone Server won't launch Firefox except in interactive mode (Ubuntu, PHP, Selenium and php-webdriver-bindings-0.9.0)
body: <p>I imagine this is a case of my not knowing quite the right combination of switches for starting up the Selenium Standalone server but here goes...</p>
  
  <p>I have an Ubuntu desktop box that I want to run test via Selenium on.  So I've installed the latest Selenium Standalone server (selenium-server-standalone-2.21.0.jar).  I can start up an interactive session of the server and get Firefox to run following the example <a href="http://dionysus.uraganov.net/software/how-to-install-selenium-server-with-firefox-on-ubuntu-11-10/" rel="nofollow">here</a> but modified for my version of Selenium and my firefox path which is /usr/bin/firefox.</p>
  
  <p>When I start up the server in a non-interactive mode something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>java -jar /usr/lib/selenium/selenium-server-standalone-2.21.0.jar -port 4444 &gt; /var/log/selenium/selenium-output.log 2&gt; /var/log/selenium/selenium-error.log &amp; echo $! &gt; /tmp/selenium.pid
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Then I get all the right feedback to say that the server is running.  However, when I attempt to run example.php from php-webdriver-bindings-0.9.0 (modified to remove the reference to "internet explorer") then it fails because Firefox is never launched.  Absolutely nothing is returned from example.php to my browser but I can see the server taking the commands (despite having added ini_set("display_errors",1); and error_reporting(E_ALL); to the top of the file).  Also the error and output logs show no errors just simple status messages from the server startup.</p>
  
  <p>Since PHP is simply passing commands to the server it seems to me that the server would have the same user whether in interactive mode or not and therefore there should be no permissions issues.</p>
  
  <p>Ultimately I think I'm going to want to set up a grid for large scale operations but for now I'd really like to get just this one server working correctly.</p>
  
  <p>Any help is greatly appreciated.</p>