Esteemed Colleagues:

I am using a Dell Inspiron laptop.

I updated a few things on Tumbleweed (don't ask me what), and
now I have suddenly lost falkon. Whenever I invoke it, it
says:

*** stack smashing detected ***: <unknown> terminated
Aborted (core dumped)

There isn't anything weird in my environment that's making it
happen, because it happens even when I type

env - DISPLAY=$DISPLAY falkon

and it also happens after "su - guest", an account that
doesn't have anything nonstandard in its environment.

An ldd on falkon shows all the shared libraries coming from
/usr/lib64 and /lib64, there aren't any weird libraries in
weird places to which falkon is dynamically linked.

I even downloaded the falkon source code and built it from
source (which wasn't easy) with CXXFLAGS=-fno-stack-protector
and CFLAGS=-fno-stack-protector and the version that I build
produces the same error message, so it isn't coming from
falkon, it's probably coming from one of the infinite number
of Qt libraries that falkon uses. However, I am able to run
k3b and okular; so far the problem appears to be specific to
falkon.

I do have a couple of nonstandard repositories in
/etc/zypp/repos.d like skype-stable and google-chrome, but
the only one, to the best of my knowledge, that causes
packages to change vendor is vlc, but you have to have vlc
because otherwise vlc and ffmpeg don't do anything useful on
SuSE. And it never used to be a problem before.

So how do I get falkon back? Thank you in advance for any
and all replies.

Also, perhaps unrelated to the above, after I updated a few
things, I am now suddenly unable to join a bluejeans.com
online class that I have been attending all week. Suddenly
my browser (google-chrome, not falkon; even when falkon was
working, it didn't function well with bluejeans.com, but I
don't blame SuSE for that) is saying that another application
is using my camera, which is preposterous, and refusing to
join the meeting until I kill this nonexistent application.
My camera is taped over, as yours should be, but I get the
same behavior even when I uncover the tape. In either case,
the browser says that some other nonexistent application is
using my camera.

You know, I would like SuSE, if not for the fact that it
bloody doesn't work. You get used to things -- like the fact
that the laptop is completely unusable when you boot into
graphics mode, unless you add "nomodeset" to the kernel
parameters, every other Linux distribution is able to run an
X server that actually works without my having to say
"nomodeset" -- and then you get used to other things -- like
that fact that my latest updates gave me an "ldd" command
that was utterly nonfunctional, because the #! line referred
to a nonexistent program /usr/bin/bash, and these updates
also recreated initrd, and since dracut uses ldd, which now
wasn't working, I was given a nonbootable system until I
fixed ldd (doesn't anybody test anything at SuSE?) and
recreated initrd -- and then you get used to other things,
and then you get used to other things, but eventually you are
no longer willing to tolerate things. It's like living in
Venezuela, I suppose. I have spent more time trying to get
my Tumbleweed system to work than I have spent on any other
OS that I have installed on my laptop -- even FreeBSD, which
requires you to spend weeks compiling ports after you install
the system, before the computer is minimally functional. I
would like to have a bloody functional Tumbleweed system, but
there's only so much time one wants to spend straightening
out one bent pin. In the meantime, if anyone out there can
tell me how to get falkon working again, it would be most
appreciated. Being able to use bluejeans.com (it worked
perfectly when I rebooted in LinuxMint) would be most
appreciated too. Thank you in advance, jay at m5 dot chicago
dot il dot us.

You've provided next to no useful details; "Dell Inspiron Laptop" is fairly vague, and if you don't know what you updated, there's little we can guess at as to WHY that update broke something.
...and instead of doing "su - guest", try logging totally out and back in through the GUI, and start a new X session.
So the problem is falkon...you're on Tumbleweed, which is a rolling release. This is sometimes the price you pay for bleeding edge. That said, patches and updates are released FREQUENTLY...have you tried running "sudo zypper dup"??
A VLC repository?? I'm using Tumbleweed and the packman repository provides the codecs, and things like VLC and ffmpeg. If you suspect that repository, why don't you simply disable it?? The packman repository is pretty much the 'standard' for such codecs/programs, aside from the libdvdcss repository for playing DVD's.
Since you say falkon is crashing, chances are it's leaving something out there. Since you don't know what you actually did/updated, you can run "lsof /dev/video0" (or whatever video device you have), to see what PID is locking the device. From there, kill it.
No, thanks...there are several threads on here dealing with the whole 'tape over my camera' thing, and the pointlessness of it.
I have zero problems with Tumbleweed, as do most folks. You only say "Dell Inspiron", but not what year/model/spec it is. I've used Tumbleweed for several years, with only ONE problem in all that time, which was not only obscure but resolvable within an hour. My main desktop is a 27" iMac that exclusively runs Tumbleweed, and it has no problems. Run it on a Vaio laptop with no problems either, and on an mini HTCP system with pretty non-standard hardware. No problems on any of them..not sure why you're having problems with a fairly vanilla laptop, unless things have been corrupted through installing packages at random. Have never, EVER, had any of the issues you're describing. The "nomodeset" has more to do with your graphics hardware, and editing GRUB to put "nomodeset" at the end of a line certainly isn't too difficult to do...and you have to do it ONCE.

Again...remove the VLC repository, add packman, and run "sudo zypper dup". That's it. Otherwise, feel free to load Mint.

2 members found this post helpful.

Oops, wrong place.

Nomodeset is primarily a troubleshooting parameter sometimes needed during to make the openSUSE installer run, but never for normal post-installation running. If nomodeset was included in the installed system's Grub it needs to be manually removed, unless and until a non-FOSS (non-openSUSE source) video driver (e.g. NVidia) requires it (as with other distros).

If your Inspiron has any form of dual graphics, e.g. Optimus, then the openSUSE installation is not complete until after first boot and following the various instructions for additional packages needed for the various dual graphics possibilities, e.g. Bumblebee or Prime.

I have done exactly what TBOne suggested:

"Again...remove the VLC repository, add packman, and run "sudo zypper
dup". That's it."

This caused my computer to download and install 7738 packages, 90% of
which had names beginning with "texlive" (this is an exaggeration, but
only a slight one). But I did it, because I was assured that it would
work. I now have the following question:

On what planet are you able to update your Tumbleweed system with the
packman repositories turned on?

When I try to do it on planet Earth, the packman repository asserts
the existence of files that do not exist. Some sample lines,
excerpted from error messages that are much much longer:


File './Essentials/x86_64/libavutil54-2.8.15-6.6.x86_64.rpm' not found on medium 'http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/'
File './Essentials/x86_64/libfaac0-1.29.9.2-2.8.x86_64.rpm' not found on medium 'http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/'
File './x86_64/libavutil55-3.4.5-17.3.x86_64.rpm' not found on medium 'http://widehat.opensuse.org/opensuse/repositories/multimedia:/libs/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/'
File './x86_64/libswscale4-3.4.5-17.3.x86_64.rpm' not found on medium 'http://widehat.opensuse.org/opensuse/repositories/multimedia:/libs/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/'
Retrieving package libavresample3-3.4.5-17.3.x86_64 (7623/7738), 100.1 KiB (148.4 KiB unpacked)
Retrieving: libavresample3-3.4.5-17.3.x86_64.rpm ..............................................................................[not found]
File './x86_64/libavresample3-3.4.5-17.3.x86_64.rpm' not found on medium 'http://widehat.opensuse.org/opensuse/repositories/multimedia:/libs/openSUSE_Tumbleweed
Retrieving: libXaw3dxft8-1.6.2d-1.39.x86_64.rpm ...............................................................................[not found]
File './Extra/x86_64/libXaw3dxft8-1.6.2d-1.39.x86_64.rpm' not found on medium 'http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/'
Abort, retry, ignore? [a/r/i/...? shows all options] (a): r
Retrieving: flash-player-ppapi-31.0.0.108-1.1.x86_64.rpm ......................................................................[not found]
File './Essentials/x86_64/flash-player-ppapi-31.0.0.108-1.1.x86_64.rpm' not found on medium 'http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/'
Retrieving: MPlayer-1.2.r38008-4.11.x86_64.rpm ................................................................................[not found]
File './Essentials/x86_64/MPlayer-1.2.r38008-4.11.x86_64.rpm' not found on medium 'http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/'
Abort, retry, ignore? [a/r/i/...? shows all options] (a): r
Retrieving package handbrake-gtk-1.1.2-1.5.x86_64 (7634/7738), 2.8 MiB ( 8.8 MiB unpacked)
Retrieving: handbrake-gtk-1.1.2-1.5.x86_64.rpm ................................................................................[not found]
File './Multimedia/x86_64/handbrake-gtk-1.1.2-1.5.x86_64.rpm' not found on medium 'http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/'
Abort, retry, ignore? [a/r/i/...? shows all options] (a): r
Retrieving package transcode-1.1.7-4.32.x86_64 (7639/7738), 1.4 MiB ( 7.4 MiB unpacked)
Retrieving: transcode-1.1.7-4.32.x86_64.rpm ...................................................................................[not found]
File './Multimedia/x86_64/transcode-1.1.7-4.32.x86_64.rpm' not found on medium 'http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/'
Abort, retry, ignore? [a/r/i/...? shows all options] (a): r


After I completed the "zupper dup", with the vlc repository turned
off, as I was told to do, I was left, of course, with a broken vlc.
Vlc now emits the following error messages:

Codec not supported:
VLC could not decode the format "h264" (H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10))

and

Codec not supported:
VLC could not decode the format "mp4v" (MPEG-4 Video)

because, as I stated in the original posting, the vlc distributed by
SuSE is broken, which is why you have to get the one in the vlc
repository, which is not broken.

I would like to point out, at this point, that I know of no other major
Linux distribution that distributes a broken vlc program.

So I tried to build vlc from source, which, of course, I could not do,
because the configure program needs to find Qt5Svg.pc, which it could
not find, because SuSE does not provide it. There is a libQt5Svg5
package, which provides the shared library. There is no
libQt5Svg5-devel package, neither in the standard repository nor in
the packman repository (which I have re-enabled, hoping that zypper
might find it there, and it did not). There is no repository that
provides the Qt5Svg.pc file. SuSE considers that file unnecessary.

I would like to point out, at this point, that there is a Qt5Svg.pc
file on my FreeBSD system, on my LinuxMint system, on my Korora
system, and on my RHEL 8.0 (actually Springdale 8.0) system. But SuSE
has left it out of its distribution -- at least, it did on the day I
installed Tumbleweed, and on the day I updated it -- even though it
does provide the Qt5Svg libraries. It just doesn't provide any way
you can build a program that uses them.

I see that I have also, thus far, failed to mention that on SuSE, the
pulseaudio program frequently exits without warning, so that suddenly
programs that worked earlier in your login session now say that they
cannot connect to the pulseaudio daemon. You have to invoke the
"pulseaudio --start" command by hand, at unpredictable intervals, and
then you have sound and video again, until the next time the
pulseaudio command silently crashes.

But, like a husband in a troubled marriage, I keep on trying to get
SuSE to work. Perhaps for the same reasons -- I do not want to walk
away from something into which I have already invested such a prodigious
amount of time and effort. If you can advise me on what to try next,
I shall be most grateful.

jay at m5 dot chicago dot il dot us

Yeah, I'm on planet Earth, and guess what? My (several) Tumbleweed systems work just fine, VLC and all. Packman enabled...zero problems.

Looking at what you posted about 'building this from source', and other such things (along with having the VLC repository enabled first), would lead one to believe that you either have not performed the installation correctly, installed from a bad image, or just didn't bother to perform any updates, and are now paying the price. If you think your VLC is 'broken' because it's saying it can't find the codecs....did you think to INSTALL the codecs?? There are many that are optional, and unless you install them, you get exactly what you asked for: VLC. That's it.

You claim to have several other working Linux systems, and appear to have problems with EVERYTHING (VLC, pulseaudio, falkon, webcams, etc, etc....), so I find it hard to believe it's the fault of openSUSE, since ALL of these things have no problems working with any system I've tried them on (falkon being the exception, since I've not used it). Have it on fanless mini-pc's, to 3U rack mounted servers, and an iMac....ALL of them with zero issues on install, update, or use. And all I ever did was a basic install, update, and addition of the packman repo....even when I used Skype, that never made a difference.

Want a suggestion? Dump the system, reload fresh and don't compile a gazillion things from source, add in repos for no good reason, or ignore messages...because what you posted omits a good number of things, like the repo-refresh information which you don't post.

Packman refreshes often and slowly, so it is quite common to start a dup of any considerable length and find that Packman packages purportedly on the mirrors when you started are no longer there by the time they are requested. When it happens to me, I abort the dup, zypper ref, then zypper dup again to pick up the freshly uploaded Packman packages.

Texlive constitutes a huge number of packages, while TW has been doing a lot of mass rebuilds in recent months. That 7000 might have been closer to 4000 if you had none of Texlive installed. If you don't use Texlive, you couldaccept any dependency removals, thenand no longer be bothered by quite such large numbers.

I haven't attempted to enable VLC repositories in over a decade. It's been even longer since I attempted to build anything from source. I use only Packman or system MM packages, and don't get conflicts trying to make MM apps install and work properly. Maybe if you remove VLC and Packman repos, dup to restore and/or remove applicable packages to achieve a OSS/Non-OSS only state, then add Packman repo back before installing VLC again, you'll find all is well.

1 members found this post helpful.

Packman Repo and VLC Repo at same time can make trouble.
Also Packman Repo and Multimedia:libs Repo at same time can make trouble.