Did something get installed wrong? "error while loading shared libraries"
 

I keep getting this error.

I tried installing Compiz, and kept getting errors where it couldn't find libraries for libGL, libdecorator, etc, and now I finally got it to work by installing 6.0, I go to install awn, and I get this error. Obviously the above error is most recent. Every time I have to search for the libwhatever.so, type in "LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/lib/libwhatever.so application" into a terminal just to get the program to run. Something isn't working right.

Whenever you add new programs to the link libraries you need to run the ldconfig command to set up the link libraries links and cache. Your problem sounds to me like ldconfig is not being run after you update the link libraries. Also every distribution I have ever used runs ldconfig at every boot.

You could try an experiment. The next time you need to do LD_PRELOAD= try running ldconfig as root instead. If that works then the solution to your problem is to run ldconfig after you do a package update.

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Steve Stites

P.S. Typically rpm packages and deb packages issue ldconfig as part of the install when they install link library files. How are you installing your packages?

If I can't find a .tgz I install from source. "su -c ldconfig" made awn work, but I never had to use ldconfig when I installed something in ubuntu from source, is there supposed to be something that automatically starts ldconfig when you compile from source?

if you used src2pkg (which is a nice way) to create a package from src. Then on running installpkg , ldconfig is automatically run. Also ldconfig in a normal slackware setup is run on startup. Maybe you/somebody else has tinkered with the startup scripts? (for e.g I have disabled ldconfig on startup!)

Well, I got a new annoying problem, this keeps popping up in more than once place now.
I tried starting CCSM from compiz, and now I need to run it using
"PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages ccsm"
This was so annoying because I couldn't get it to work with fusion icon that I renamed /usr/local/bin/ccsm to ccsm~ and replaced ccsm with a bash script that would run ccsm~ with the python path.
I can't compile anything with git because I aways get an error with PKG_CONFIG_PATH, so now I have to run it with "PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/share/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/" just so it knows where to find everything.
I've never had to do stuff like this before, I've been using linux for a year now, and slackware for at least 2 months, I did a complete reinstall and now this is popping up as a problem. What's going on?