Re: D-Bus error trying to run gaim AND how do i ensure better upgrades?
On Saturday 18 November 2006 02:11, Florian Kulzer wrote:
> 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.
>
> --
i had the initial problem with the dbus restart until i did it as root and
indeed this put an end to the dbus error when i start gaim. but i've still
got the libpangocairo error and gaim disappears when i try to use it. but i
installed 'kopete' and it works well.
thanks for the info on Etch. this is light at the end of the tunnel. things
are tolerable as long as there is hope. ;.) i'm just going to ignore the gaim
problem and other mosquitos until after i've done the upgrade after the Etch
release.
tom arnall
north spit, ca
usa
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