Greetings and Salutations,

Recently, evolution stopped working for me. I can't attribute it to anything specific, though it may have been an update that caused it. Evolution will no longer start, and only displays the following to std_err:

Inconsistency detected by ld.so: ../sysdeps/i386/dl-machine.h: 628: elf_machine_rel_relative: Assertion `((reloc->r_info) & 0xff) == 8' failed!

I am running Fedora 11 x86 and this is the first major problem that I've had, which is amazing when you consider my ancient machine; an IBM Thinkpad T40 with 768MB RAM.

Would love to know if someone has a clue about what to do. Thank you for your time.

You have seen https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...se/+bug/293595

In my experience, one gets the weirdest errors from things like perl and python. Fedora updates so often you always land in a mess sooner or later. I suggest you _downgrade_ evolution, ld.so is part of glibc, so that's not hugely helpful.

I would hunt a bit with ldd. try
ldd /path/to/evolution |grep found to see if libs are missing, and run ldconfig

Also, instead of starting it from an icon, start evolution in a terminal. You might get a more verbose barf that way.

we all know that. god created the heaven and da urfs in 6 days! or was it the other way round? no forget it, actually religion is broken.

regarding you problem. well, darwin isn't around anymore and i'm no biologist. however i'd say you messed with some libraries. google for " elf_machine_rel_relative: Assertion `((reloc->r_info) & 0xff) == 8' failed" this might help.

cheers

Thank you for your replies.

The "barf" that I pasted above came from the terminal. I googled the crap out of various combinations of the error. Nothing came up. This is why I wrote to this wonderful site.

Running evolution --debug debug.txt gives me only this error. I wish it be more verbose.

It helps to know that ld is part of glibc. That is something I didn't know.

As something that might help, i tried running yum reinstall evolution which spit out an error that libkhtml.so (and some versions that I don't recall) were not elf files because of an incorrect header. So I reinstalled gtkhtml. This didn't fix the error. I then tried reinstalling evolution, and this new error did not show up. So I'm still stuck with the original error, but I'm wondering if that helps at all.

Thanks again for the replies.

Alrighty. I reinstalled glibc just to see if that would work. It didn't. I should have known.

So, I used ldd. I'm not sure what I'm looking for, though. Should it say missing if a library is missing?

ldconfig will run successfully, but nothing changes. Am I supposed to use any switches or anything?

I'm not finding a whole lot to answer these questions on Google. Maybe I just don't know what term to Google.

did you google it with google, i mean the google google? it's actually a very good site to find things on the interweb. because my google brought up something like this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...se/+bug/293595 as the first result out at least 5 relevant results. maybe you typed google into your goole and i have it on good authority that this will break your internet.

anyway, here's an excerpt from the above bugreport that might be helpful:
since you stated it might be something glibc related try the above. try to run a hello world program to see if you can produce elf binaries. if you can't (re)install libc6-dev (i.e. header and stuff).

cheers :::

This is an odd one. In fact it's why I don't use Fedora.
ld.so is a dynamic linker - a stage of compilation where the system takes all the separate object files and lashes them together into one program. ld.so is for old systems; /lib/ld-linux.so.2 is for glibc-2.x systems. This is a _bad_crash_. RPMs should not be dynamically linking - all that was done before the rpm was built, unless you're installing a 'noarch. or a 'source' rpm. Those are built on your machine.

Find evolution with 'which evolution'. Then
ldd /path/to/evolution
shows the libraries it is linked against, and where they are found.
ldd evolution |grep found
refines that to the ones that weren't found. I would also try to open the rpm. If rpm will not oblige, there are rpm2targz scripts, and slackware's one is excellent.. Open it somewhere. Then you can diff the files, and see the script it's trying to run.

I hope that good posts like this can continue to happen.

ldd is not showing any negative output. It's funny that I've used evolution for a couple of years. I like evolution's setup. What I may wind up doing is building from source (the best way, I know) instead of using Fedora's prebuilds.

The upsetting part is the lack of verbosity during the crash. This error should spit out a little more debugging information, in my opinion.

Thanks for the input.

Okay, quick update. I reinstalled every program which evolution included with it.

yum reinstall {evolution,evolution-data-server,beagle-evolution,evolution-data-server-devel,evolution-data-server-doc,evolution-help,evolution-perl,evolution-rss,evolution-sharp}

After I did this, I accidentally opened evolution as root. It worked! The problem is that it still won't start under my account. Should I remove the .evolution folder? I would hate to lose all of my contacts and such.

i assume the contacts list is only one file. back it up (and everything else like: cp -r $HOME/.evolution $HOME/bak). then rm the original. start evolution and see if it works. if so, cp your contacts back where they belong and you're done .

I tried removing the ~/.evolution folder and the ~/.gconf/apps/evolution folder. No good. Why will it start as root but not my account? I'm pretty confused about that. Aren't all of the plugins in the /usr/share/evolution folder?

i'm fishing in muddy waters. the problem seems to have to do with glibc and ld. i found this report google for "Inconsistency detected by ld.so": http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/.../msg00247.html. in that case it was a linking problem that had to do with RPATH. i don't understand much of it but the bottom line seems to be that you tampered with some libs or their linking. what was is that you did before evolution stopped working? :::

As I first wrote, I can't attribute it to anything specific. I have tried to steer clear of messing with libraries and linking. The only real thing I can think of is an update, though I have my doubts that it was an update.

In a recent development, and that's because I'm slow, I tried starting with disabling plugins:

And it loads. I'm not sure what plugins I even have. Of course, when I click "Edit->Preferences...", evolution dies.

Next step, I remove evolution-rss. This is the only real plugin that I have installed, and I just have a sneaky suspicion.

Shazaam! It works from command line, and it works from the icon.

This sounds like a bug. I'm going to see what happens if I try enabling evolution-rss again.

I think that firefox updated recently. Apparently, this update has caused evolution-rss to break before.

http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-L.../msg02135.html

So I guess that I will search out the update history recently and determine whether or not it's a bug. At that point, I'll submit it.

It's a shame. It makes it really easy to keep up on Slashdot and Techcrunch....okay, Dilbert and xkcd, when I check my e-mail in the mornings. But at least I have familiarity again. Thanks for the help, everyone!

Firefox was updated in Fedora on August 4th, 2009. I think this is what broke evolution-rss, based on the other article that I found. Hopefully, someone else that has this problem might be able to verify my rush to judgement. I was not with a steady internet connection at the time, so I didn't update until several days later. I didn't notice the break right away.

Anyway, I'll submit it as a bug. Thanks again for the help.