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I managed to hose my primary computer nicely a couple of days ago, trying to upgrade the gnome desktop from 2.8 to 2.10. With complete confidence, I neglected to keep my old installation around, and in my new installation nautilus and gnome-panel crash the moment they start. I've burned countless hours the past two days trying to solve the problem, but I'm at a complete loss. I'm about to the point of re-installing a distro (I was on an old Fedora Core 1 installation) to get a fresh start -- all my personal data is safely on the home partition. Quite frustrating, as I'm sure it's something silly, like linking against the wrong version of some library... I just don't know how to properly debug it.
Once I get this resolved, I'll start updating the site again. I also started working on a new look for the site. The front page will be a two column look, maybe the rest of the pages too. The advantage being that forums, mailing lists, features, etc, will be visible on the front page. It's probably a month or two away from going live.
Okay, time to start downloading some iso's. I'm tired of fighting my broken Garnome installation.
Debug 101
Well if you start from the command line (rather than from gdm) do you get any core dumps as you start X with gnome? You can run the core dump through gdb and get an idea which library things broke in:
gdb /path/to/app core
bt
As your running an RPM based distro perhaps double checking all your dependancies are met by doing
rpm -Va > verify.log
And checking for missing dependancies or files.
--
Alex
Debug 101
I'm not getting any coredumps, though I looked. I do start from the command line. I did see an error about "too many segmentation faults" at one point, which got me looking for coredumps. I tried to launch nautilus with strace, but it auto-launches already preventing my manual attempt from working, and I couldn't figure out how to stop that.
I'm using garnome, so it's compiled from source, not with with rpms. I haven't touched the rpm system since I first installed the OS long ago, preferring to compile things from source. This is likely the problem, somewhere along the line I broke a dependancy with a newer or older version of something...
Thanks for the feedback and ideas! :)
ldd
Hmm, no coredumps? You have set ulimit -c right?
You could just try running ldd across all your ganome binaries and checking it is able to resolve all the libraries
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Alex
re: ldd
Thanks for the help, but I became frustrated and re-installed. I rely on the computer too much to learn to debug gnome at the moment. Rather lazy of me, I know...
Its the price of wanting blee
Its the price of wanting bleeding edge ;-)
FWIW before I moved to a pure source based distro I used to run on various package based development tracks (like Mandrake Cooker) which allowed me to be on the latest/greatest but still with the benefit of dependancy tracking etc...
A lot of stable distros often have additional package repositries for people who want to stay current without going outside the package system and doing manual installs. Debian has backports.org, SuSE usr-local-bin and others.
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Alex
source
Yeah, most everything I use I've compiled from source. And occasionally that means I break something, like now. Usually I can/do sit down and figure out what I've done wrong, but the timing was bad on this most recent mistake.
Installing a new distro was welcome, as I had introduced a few quirks over the past year or two... various library and header mismatches that I never had managed to fix and instead had been working around. ;)
garnome
Yes, it seems there are several issues with garnome 2.10.0.1 compiling correctly on several recent distros - more specifically, the "-Wl,--export-dynamic" LDFLAGS need to be added to one or more of the individual garnome package Makefiles, in order for many of the library functions to be available to the dependent components. I have been wrestling with this problem for over 2 weeks - and during the course of this, I too managed to bust my desktop and had to reinstall :(
Here is the thread:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/garnome-list/2005-March/msg00235.html