artsd - here's an odd one
 

Ever since I installed Mandriva 2007 as an upgrade to my highly bastardized Mandriva 10.1, I haven't had system sounds working. Never paid much attention; I'm really not sure when was the last time they worked. However, whenever I logged in or started the system (and I have a bit of hardware trouble right now, so restarts have been a LOT more frequent than they should be) I would get a KDE crash message that artsd had crashed.

Today I had some time and decided to sort it out. Turns out that artsd was segfaulting because it couldn't find libartsbuilder.la, libartsbuilder.so.0, libartsmidi.la, and libartsmidi.so.0.

OK. I must be missing a package. Went looking. All these files are reportedly found in kdemultimedia, kdemultimedia-common, kdemultimedia-arts, and the associated lib packages for these.

Well I had those packages installed. But, since this wasn't working, I downloaded and force reinstalls of them. Didn't fix the problem; files still were not found.

I hunted and hunted, and googled everywhere, and everything kept pointing me back to these packages. I searched these packages and, despite what everything I could find on the net said, none of these missing libraries were in any of these packages. I had thought that perhaps forcing the reinstall would cause the installation to generate the packages (though this would have been pretty strange, requiring them to be compiled on the fly), but that didn't happen.

A couple of weeks ago, I installed Kubuntu on my laptop. So I fired up the laptop and, lo and behold, all the files I needed were there. Well, I just copied them over to the Mandriva installation and now my system sound works.

Weird, huh? Anyone here have any idea where those libraries *really* are kept? Or is this a mandriva 2007 bug?

I don't think so. I am not having any trouble with sound here, and I have 2007.0 and I'm testing 2007.1. Sound works as expected on both. I have run into similar trouble with other packages on earlier releases, and this is what I do:

I identify the packages that need to be reinstalled.

I install them with kpackage, and select the replace files and replace packages options.

If that does not work, I rip out the package(s) using kpackage, with remove all versions selected and check dependencies unselected, then reinstall the package(s) as above.

I am not familiar with kpackage and I apparently don't have it on this system.

When I have to force a reinstall that urpmi refuses to do, I do an

rpm --allfiles --force --install --nodeps packagename

to compel the install regardless of anything else. In the current situation this didn't help.

I thought about removing/reinstalling arts, but chose not to because of the large number of other things that would have been removed automatically due to their dependence on arts.

I do find it to be odd that I didn't find these libraries in the rpms when I browsed them using rpm -qpl which will list all the contents.

Is kpackage a part of the normal KDE install? Again, I don't seem to have it.

edit: OK, I found/installed kpackage. It's just a frontend to rpm, but that's OK; rpm is cryptic and studying the manpages to figure out how the options work together is a royal pain. The mandriva package manager lacks the capability to set options on the installs, so perhaps kpackage will be nicer. We'll see.

Just to make it clear, I use urpmi or the package manager for normal use. I only use kpackage when I want fast and easy access to the installation options it supports.

I am familiar with and can use the command line, but I think visually, so the GUI is my friend :).