I am using Debian wheezy with Xfce for a while so far so good, until today. After I reboot my machine this morning, the x-window cannot start anymore. I saw the following message when try to start x-window.

# startx
/usr/bin/X: /usr/local/lib/libz.so.1: version 'ZLIB_1.2.5.2' not found (required by /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfontenc.so.1)
xinit: giving up
xinit: unable to connect to X server: connection refused
xinit: server error

I tried almost everything, update and upgrade all library/packages, but cannot find any solution. Google can found a report this is a bug 3 years back. But no record on this recently. Now I stuck here cannot do my work. Can anyone remind me any workaround to bypass this problem? Many thanks in advance.

My machine's uname output is:

Linux tanturi 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.68-1+deb7u1 x86_64 GNU/Linux

So you should check and install zlib package.

Thanks for reply, veerain.

I did check the zlib, the libz.so.1 exists in /usr/local/lib linked to libz.so.1.2.5 at the same directory.

use dpkg -l, I got:

The issue is temporary resolved, thanks for everyone. I will describe the resolution here and hope someone can tell me if there is any potential problems.

After last post I realized the latest version of zlib is 1.2.7 which is already in my system. And the library /usr/local/lib/libz.so.1.2.5 is out of date and should not be used. I don't know since when it is put there and the system dependency is changed to depends on this library, probably due to some software installation I done in the past few weeks.

I do a search to the whole file system and find this /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1.2.7 existed. I guess this should be the correct library. Thus I let the /usr/local/lib/libz.so.1 links to this correct library. And now the it seems fine, at least X is up, not sure about others software yet.

I guess maybe next time the zlib upgrade might bring up some troubles again, besides that, can anyone tell me any other potential problems? Or how to correct this problem in a better way?

Thanks in advance.

Do you have path set for '/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu' in '/etc/ld.so.conf' file and have run ldconfig.

The /etc/ld.so.conf contains one line:
and /etc/ld.so.conf.d has 4 .conf files, they are:

May you try renaming/removing this file '/usr/local/lib/libz.so.1.2.5' and see whether it works. It may be that this file+path has been hard set in the required executables.

I renamed '/usr/local/lib/libz.so.1.2.5' to '/usr/local/lib/libz.so.1.2.5.bak', so far so good. It seems should be ok. Thanks.