Re: Skype and more

[Richard Adams <pa3gcu@zeelandnet.nl>]

On Wednesday 30 March 2005 09:19, Peter wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Slackware 10.1 kernel 2.4.29
>
> Sometime ago I reported that skype would not open and at the same time
> after I had reinstalled slackware 10, xine and totem did not open anymore.
> Richard Adams then suggested to reinstall slackware w/o the old /usr/local
> and /home mounted, instead mount them after the installation.

I suggested to you to install slack again without using you old /usr/local 
and /home dir´s to prove a point, the point i pointed out to you in a couple 
of previous mails, i am sure they can be found in google groups, i mentioned 
two things, one is the order of /etc/ld.so.conf and installing programs 
yourself and possably unknowingly installing them in /usr/local/ .

>
> Well that worked only until I installed additional programs such as efax
> after which neither skype nor the other 2 mentioned programs would not open
> again
>
> When slackware is installed it puts a number of library paths into
> /etc/ld.so.conf. This list is headed by /usr/local/lib. Now I found that
> this positioning was the cause of the problems. If I put /usr/local/lib at
> the end of the list all programs open properly and I can install further
> new programs w/o any change, meaning all programs keep on opening properly.
> If I just deactivate /usr/local/lib then naturally programs looking at that
> path will not open such as siag.

The order of /etc/ld.so.conf is of course important, slackware has it (i 
belive) in that order because slackware does not have RPMs slackers install 
tarballs now in a tarball full of source code there is 99% of the time a 
program called configure supplied, one runs ./configure and all executeables 
and libs get installed into /usr/local, remember one thing if we have xine 
installed and slackware does have it installed in /usr/bin and libs 
in /usr/lib we can expect problems for the simple reason we have 2 sets of 
libs and 2 sets of exectuables for ONE program in our $PATH .
To get around that so called problem ./configure has lots (and i mean) lots of 
options, like
--bindir=DIR            user executables in DIR [EPREFIX/bin]
--libdir=DIR            object code libraries in DIR [EPREFIX/lib]

There are around 60 different options.

If you had used something like

./configure --bindir=usr/bin --libdir=/usr/lib

Then xine would have been installed into /usr/bin and would have overwritten 
the version installed by slackware at install time, if you install another 
verion into /usr/local* then you will confuse your system and most 
importantly yourself.

Now haing said that the chances are that a lib whcih got installed by one of 
the two programs into /usr/local/lib was incompatable with skype hence skype 
fails to open.

>
> I just thought I will let the list know in case others have similar
> experiences, there was one in skype forum.

I tryed to explain this to you in our private comverstaion emails, it seems i 
failed. I will try better next time.

>
> Regards

--
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