Gdm on FC5 refuses to start after fixing librsvg2 probs <SOLVED>

Nigel Henry cave.dnb at tiscali.fr
Wed Jan 17 22:06:35 UTC 2007


On Tuesday 16 January 2007 14:36, Nigel Henry wrote:
> I've now reached the stage where I have to ask for some help with this.
>
> With a fresh install of FC5, and after updates I found, as I have on
> previous occasions 2 versions of librsvg2 installed, which create
> conflicts. After an horrendous job removing the earlier version, I now find
> that gdm won't start, and the pid in /var/run/gdm.pid is missing.

The answer to this problem is to upgrade librsvg2 before doing any other 
upgrades to a newly installed FC5. I did this on latest reinstall, and the 
library updated ok, just leaving the latest version installed.

I followed this with all the rest of the upgrades, which proceeded with no 
problems, and gdm is still working ok.

I believe what happened when I had 2 versions of librsvg2 installed, and 
removed the earlier one using rpm -e, was that this messed up the links 
in /usr/lib for librsvg2. These had previously pointed from librsvg-2.so.2 
(which is a dependency of gdm) to librsvg-2.so.2.14.2, and possibly (but I 
don't know for sure) there was a link from librsvg-2.so.2.14.2 pointing to 
librsvg-2.so.2.14.4.  When I used rpm -e to remove the earlier, unwanted 
duplicate package, it removed librsvg-2.so.2.14.2 from /usr/lib, thus 
breaking the chain of links.

Now librsvg-2.so.2 (gdm's dependency) was still pointing to 
librsvg-2.so.2.14.2, which no longer existed, and would explain why gdm, 
which was no longer able to link to the latest version of librsvg2 was 
failing.

I had this problem with FC5 back in Oct 2006, struggled to fix it, and forgot 
to write down the fix. I think then though, it was a matter of mere chance 
that it was fixed.

Of course this solution is of absolutely no use if you have just installed 
FC5, and have just gone ahead with all the updates, oblivious of the librsvg2 
duplicated package problem. Anyway it will no doubt end up in Google, as my 
Oct 2006 post did, so someone may benefit from this solution.

Nigel.




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