Dear All,

I have installed Ubuntu recently (loving it) and have experienced almost no problems (for a newbie).

Last night I decided to get myself some software. My machine not on the internet, I couldn't try out the apt-get stuff I read about but instead used the source. I tried to install Xine-lib (did not install for X11 or something like that), xine-ui (said it couldn't find xine-lib), RealPlayer (worked).

After another try of xine-lib, my gnome-session started to not respond. I tried a logout and login, but as soon as I logged out I was stuck. A reboot did not do anything else.

It now starts up into a text logon - prior to that, it show that gdm doesn't load.

I have tried 'startx' in commandline but that only gives me an error (no such file or directory).

Thanks in advance,
Akiva

[EDIT] The xine website told me to fiddle around with the ld.so.conf file in /etc. I did that but have now changed it back using terminal.

try running ldconfig as root
if that doesnt' help post ur log files
/var/log

they surely will show You/us what files u r missing

Sorry about the late reply...

Wow! Genius! It works now...I did an ldconfig and rebooted. Back to Ubuntu.

I just want to know how I screwed up now: what does ld.so.conf do? Does it specify something for X to use? If so, what does xine want with it?

Thanks a lot!

Akiva

ldconfig generates a list of dynamic libraries so that programs compiled dynamically can find them. ld.so.conf is simply a list of directories where they can be found.

Statically compiled programs will include the libraries into the executable file when compiled making them much larger. Most programs are dynamically linked.

And no you didn't break anything It is fairly normal to have to run /sbin/ldconfig after installing or compiling software...

Thanks, n0xvb! I didn't know about ldconfig--I knew about static versus dynamic program compilation, but didn't know there was a tool for helping programs find the libraries they need. That could have, probably, saved me a lot of grief and manual creation of links in the past.

I'll try to remember to run ldconfig after every compilation of a non-static package from now on.

(I've found a few static ones that couldn't locate existing libraries, too.)

Yeah, whenever I do a compile I always add the ldconfig to the end. I've been bitten by that same problem!

./configure;make;make install;/sbin/ldconfig