Re: D-Bus error trying to run gaim AND how do i ensure better upgrades?
On Fri, Nov 17, 2006 at 15:50:33 -0800, tom arnall wrote:
> On Tuesday 14 November 2006 13:49, Florian Kulzer wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 12, 2006 at 16:19:57 -0800, tom arnall wrote:
> > > i did an upgrade of my testing system recently and afterwards have found
> > > a nubmer of problems on my system. the most recent is that i can't run
> > > gaim properly. when i try to, the screen appears momentarily and then
> > > goes away, leaving the folowing error message in the console.
> > >
> > >
> > > D-Bus library appears to be incorrectly set up; failed to read
> > > machine uuid: Failed to open "/var/lib/dbus/machine-id": No such
> > > file or directory
> > > See the manual page for dbus-uuidgen to correct this issue.
> > > Continuing with a bogus made-up machine UUID, which may cause
> > > problems.gaim: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libpangocairo-1.0.so.0:\
> > > undefined symbol: cairo_scaled_font_get_font_options
> > >
> > > i had some problems earlier with gaim and dealt with them by copying the
> > > config file from the root user to my user's directory, but the D-Bus
> > > error is new and started when i reinstalled gaim to deal with some other
> > > problems.
> > >
> > > What is the D-Bus error about?
> >
> > Maybe dbus is not running. What happens if you try
> >
> > /etc/init.d/dbus start
> >
> > or
> >
> > /etc/init.d/dbus restart
> >
> > ?
> >
> > > Also, how can i lessen my chances of breaking things when i upgrade. (i
> > > have both testing and stable addresses in my sources.list file)
> >
> > Install apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges or stay with stable.
[...]
> is there an easy way to go back to stable from testing? the stuff i've seen on
> google so far is not encouraging in this regard.
Downgrading is "not supported". This means that you have to figure out
lots of things yourself which are normally taken care of by apt and the
careful considerations of the package maintainers. There is a simple
practical reason why downgrades are done so rarely: The people who know
Debian well enough to pull off a successful downgrade are also capable
of keeping a testing/unstable system up and running. If, on the other
hand, you have repeated problems with testing then it is almost certain
that you will run into serious trouble with the downgrade. Another point
is that reinstalling stable can normally be done faster than
downgrading even if you have a black belt in Debian-Fu.
That being said, I would not go back to Sarge now. Etch is almost
release-ready anyway, so you just need to make sure that your
sources.list points to Etch explicitly (and not "testing") and you will
have a "stable" system with minimum hassle if you do another upgrade
when Etch is released in about a month (fingers crossed).
For now, to fix the dbus issue, check for error messages when you
restart dbus and make sure that the /var/lib/dbus/machine-id file is
created. Post you findings here if you cannot make sense of them
yourself.
--
Regards,
Florian
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