I posted this on the Audacity forum but I don't know if it is an Audacity problem or a SuSE problem so thought I would ask here as well.
openSuSE 10.2 32 bit version running on an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ system w/ 2Gb ram. No new hardware lately. System has been running well and was running Audacity 1.3.4-2.pm.beta just fine until just this week. I've had some kind of corrupted file in the /home/.Trash-0 folder and had to go thru somewhat extraordinary means to get rid of the corrupted files. But now that the Trash bin issue has been resolved, I find that when I try to run the Audacity executable it won't run.
There is a quick light of the HDD monitor LED and absolutely nothing more observable happens. There are no temporary files created, no splash, no errors, nothing.
Checking Process Table and there are no Audacity processes running.
Same thing happens if I logon as root.
I've uninstalled and reinstalled Audacity and several related apps and applets according to various online posts about problems with Audacity and nothing has made any difference at all.
I've run back through the sound card hardware setup to no avail.
And indeed the sound system works fine. Self test at start up is successful and Amarok, Kaffeine, AVIDeMux, MPlayer, etc. all work fine in terms of sound output. VNC does not. (just realized that one...it WAS working fine last week too...)
Any ideas what the deal is?
Never saw an application that simply would not at least initialize or start and hang, or throw an error of some sort.
I'm desperate as Audacity is pretty much in a league by itself in terms of .mp3 editors as far as I know.
Sweep is nice but won't handle .mp3's last I checked.
Thanks for any help.

Is the audacity command really pointing to the right executable? Try
to find out.

Did you start Audacity from the command line? If not, try so, there are usually much more error messages. Dunno how the thing is called in Gnome if you are running that, but in KDE it is called Konsole. Open a window which gives you a command prompt. Do NOT log in as root, that makes that no GUI app will start.

Since you said you had a file curruption problem, did you try to delete your Audacity settings file? There is a folder .audacity-data in you home directory (not the decimal point as first character, you have to unhide hidden files in order to see it)

jlinkels

Thanks for the suggestions:

type audacity reveals that it is indeed pointing to the correct file /usr/bin/audacity. Even trying to execute that file explicitly does not start the program.

There are no audacity files being created on the user path at all...so no .cfg file. Understood about the hidden files. I suspect since the routine isn't starting then that step hasn't been taken yet by the application.

BUT! trying to start from a command prompt revealed this error:
error while loading shared libraries: libmad.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This was either corrupted or needed bumped in version. Ran YaST and updated all regarding libmad and the problem is resolved.

Thanks jlinkels!