On my Mandrake 9.0 distro, I've been attempting to upgrade glibc, and the million other things that go along with it, in order to get the latest version of Firebird with XFT support working. I managed to upgrade, using rpm, the following:

glibc-2.3.2
glibc-devel-2.3.2
binutils-2.13.90
chkconfig-1.3
ifplugd-0.15
initscripts-7.06
locales-2.3.2
locales-en-2.3.2

...and probably some others. The upgrade went relatively painlessly once all the dependencies were resolved. However, now RPM seems to be broken. Specifically, when I attempted to install fontconfig and libfontconfig (any version), RPM simply says:

Preparing: ########## [100%]
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

And nothing gets installed. Worse, my handy red-carpet program from Ximian seems to be broken; it won't run, balking about being unable to determine the system or distribution type. Worse than that, I cannot seem to use RPM to install or remove *anything* anymore; it always segfaults. Attempting to install anything using rpm --rebuild to install source rpms results in:

error: line 27: Dependency tokens must begin with alpha-numeric, '_' or '/': PreReq: %mklibname yadda yadda...

I seem to recall having this precise problem sometime ago, but don't recall how I fixed it; I think I must have just reinstalled. Turning on verbose messaging with the -v flag to rpm does not provide any additional clues.

Any suggestions?

Update: I've found that a lot of other people have had similar problems with rpm segfaulting after a glibc install. In the case of RedHat, it appears that it's necessary to install the i686 version instead of the i386 version. Only i586 appears to be available for Mandrake, though, so that doesn't help me any (though it may help someone).

Also, another thread indicated that 'rpmu' may work - and sure enough, it does! At least, for installing stuff it appears to work without segfaulting.

Presumably the version of rpm I have (4.0.4-19mdk) has some oblique dependency on glibc2.2, which maybe is why glibc2.3 broke it. I'm going to attempt to upgrade rpm (and the ten thousand things that go along with it) to see if that may help. Now that I know rpmu will work, I can make some progress without having to revert all the upgrades I did for glibc.

It's truly a shame that something as major and important as glibc would be so darn annoying to upgrade

Progress reports will follow...

You may have a corrupt rpm data base. Read:
man rpm

Then try rebuilding the rpm data base with:
rpm --rebuilddb


On your original problem with Firebird:
The Firebird rpm that you were installing was probably compiled with a later version of gcc and glibc than you have installed on your system. You can upgrade gcc, glibc, etc. to accomodate Firebird if you want. Another possibility is to download the Firebird source tarball and see if that will compile OK on your present gcc.

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Steve Stites

Ah, yes, I tried that. No luck with solving the segfault problem, unfortunately.

I think I'm a little ways past that point. It's probably gonna be harder to downgrade glibc at this point than it would be to trudge onward. It's a good suggestion, though. Might have prevented some of these headaches.

My current status is: I've managed to upgrade rpm, which entailed upgrading all of the following:

rpm
rpmtools
rpm-build
rpm-helper
perl
perl-base
perl-devel
perl-URPM
libtool

...and some other stuff. This appears to have solved the segfault problem - I can now use rpm with impunity. Finally, getting to my original goal, which was to upgrade XFree86 to 4.3.0, I upgraded half a dozen more packages and then got XFree86-4.3 and all of its friends installed. I have not had to resort to --nodeps during any of this - the last thing I need is *more* dependency problems!

MozillaFirebird now quietly crashes without any errors whatsoever, before it even starts up And I appear to have some problems with KDM, since my login screen is strangely stretched horizontally. Other than that, everything seems peachy. I'll see if upgrading some of my kde stuff helps to fix that KDM problem...

"MozillaFirebird now quietly crashes without any errors whatsoever, before it even starts up"

You might be able to get a meaningful error message by opening a terminal and starting mozilla from the command line.


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Steve Stites

Alas, no.

However, peeking at /var/log/messages as it tries to boot, I find:

Oct 21 20:08:41 malcolm gconfd (eric-14340): starting (version 1.2.1), pid 14340 user 'eric'
Oct 21 20:08:41 malcolm gconfd (eric-14340): Failed to load source "xml:readwrite:/home/eric/.gconf": Failed to lock '/home/eric/.gconf/%gconf-xml-backend.lock/ior': probably another process has the lock, or your operating system has NFS file locking misconfigured (Resource temporarily unavailable)
Oct 21 20:08:41 malcolm gconfd (eric-14340): Resolved address "xml:readonly:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory" to a read-only config source at position 0
Oct 21 20:08:41 malcolm gconfd (eric-14340): Resolved address "xml:readonly:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults" to a read-only config source at position 1
Oct 21 20:08:41 malcolm gconfd (eric-14340): None of the resolved addresses are writable; saving configuration settings will not be possible
Oct 21 20:08:41 malcolm gconfd (eric-14340): No writable config sources successfully resolved, may not be able to save some configuration changes
Oct 21 20:08:41 malcolm gconfd (eric-14340): Unable to open saved state file '/home/eric/.gconfd/saved_state': No such file or directory
Oct 21 20:08:51 malcolm gconfd (eric-14220): GConf server is not in use, shutting down.
Oct 21 20:08:51 malcolm gconfd (eric-14220): Exiting


I've upgraded GConf, libGConf1, GConf2, libGConf2, and gconf-editor. The result is that I don't get the errors above, and MozillaFirebird simply hangs and never loads.

Further investigation, by running MozillaFirebird-bin directly, rather than relying on scripts, reveals:

./MozillaFirebird-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libmozjs.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Which is odd, because libmozjs.so is sitting right there in the same directory with the executable. I've run ldconfig to see if it'll recognize, but no luck yet.

Making progress, bit by bit... I think...

P.S. - The above problem only occurs with MozillaFirebird-0.7 build for GTK2 and XFT. The normal 0.7 build works, but that does me no good because the whole reason I went through all the above is to get XFT working

In my system libmozjs.so is located in two different libraries. Neither library
is listed in /etc/ld.so.conf:

/opt/mozilla/lib/libmozjs.so
/opt/OpenOffice.org1.1.0/program/libmozjs.so

In my script /usr/bin/mozilla Mozilla seems to find libmozjs.so with the
following code:

MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="/opt/mozilla/lib"
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME

So your error message:
" error while loading shared libraries: libmozjs.so: cannot open shared object
file: No such file or directory"
may be an artifact of not starting Mozilla through the script.

You could try issuing the two lines above (or your script's equivalent) before issuing:
./MozillaFirebird-bin


----------------------------
Steve Stites

Thanks for the suggestions! However, I am beginning to think it's a gconfd problem. I've just finished getting gvim re-installed, and it suffers from the same problem - hangups on starting, and errors in /var/log/messages pertaining to gconfd. The error about libmozjs.so was probably just a symptom of running MozillaFirebird-bin instead of the normal startup script. Gvim gives the following error:

gvim: relocation error: gvim: undefined symbol: g_set_application_name

So, presumably some of my libraries are out of date or incompatible with, I would assume, the new glibc I've installed. Any suggestions would be welcome! I'll keep poking away at it.

I never did accurately pin down the problem with gconf, but I'm certain it was related to gconf somehow; any Gnome application would suffer the same hangups.

The solution, which is lame but worked, was to keep upgrading everything in sight until things started working. I began with the prerequisites to gconf, which includes things like gtk+, gtk+-x11, libgdk_pixbuf, libglib1, libglib2, etc. Each of those have some of their own prerequisites, so it was a long drawn-out forced upgrade of sorts.

I think my least favorite aspect of the RPM system, and of Linux packages in general, is the confusing naming system. I am also not fond of the idea of having foo1 and foo2, which are separate, yet kind of related, yet totally incompatible versions of the same package, which often must both be installed in order for everything else to work. It's annoying to have to remember that libglib1.2-1.2.10-11mdk is a totally different package from libglib2.0_0-2.2.3-1mdk, even though their names look the same. However, I have never been more grateful for bash's tab autocompletion!

MozillaFirebird now works, as does GVim, though I've not tried many other Gnome programs yet. Apparently I'm on the right track, at least. Best of all, anti-aliased fonts appear to be working. Most of them are still ugly, but at least now they are smooth and ugly.

"I never did accurately pin down the problem with gconf, but I'm certain it was related to gconf somehow; any Gnome application would suffer the same hangups."

You may have hit the problem with libxml and libxml2. The developers tried to make gnome1 and gnome2 into separate groups of packages. In the case of libxml and libxml2 they did not completely succeed. Here is a thread where unholy had that problem.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=105371

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
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Steve Stites