Fedora 27 and PixInsight work around

[dwight_talley]

I am not a programmer and prefer simple program installs which this did not turn out to be.  I started out with a clean hard drive and installed Fedora 27 on it.  i then downloaded and installed PixInsight.  Of course there were problems.  PixInsight would not start.  I then started it from the command line to see what the errors were.

First error:

 error while loading shared libraries: libXss.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Fix:

pkcon install libXScrnSaver

Second Error:

/opt/PixInsight/bin/lib/libz.so.1: version `ZLIB_1.2.9' not found (required by /lib64/libpng16.so.16)

Fix:

rename the libz.so file in PixInsight's bin/lib directory          cd PixInsight/bin/lib;mv libz.so.1 libz.so.1.xx

Reinstall PixInsight again.

That made it work for me.  I tried it three times on different computers and got the same errors each time and the fixes worked . Should work for you and a Fedora 27 build.  Even updating Fedora did not fix the problem.  There may be easier ways to do this but I got these fixes by doing several hours of searching online.

Dwight

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Dwight,

The next version of PixInsight will run out-of-the-box in the latest mainstream Linux distributions. Sorry for the inconvenience.

However, please note that these issues are normal and even expectable when you use cutting-edge distributions such as the latest Fedora versions. Even if I make efforts to support these distributions in the next version of PixInsight, similar issues will probably happen with subsequent distributions. This is because Linux development is very dynamic and constantly evolving in significant ways. One must always be prepared to search and find solutions to these small incompatibilities; they are a very small price to pay for working with one of the best operating systems available—the other one is FreeBSD, of course

[ChoJin]

btw, is it possible to have the source code of the linux installer?

I tried to run it on ubuntu 17.10 (standard fresh new default install) and it completely messed up the X install (to say the least, really weird on, blue background, not showing any icons anymore, couldn't log in)

Fortunately I had installed sshd before, so I could repair the system. I tried to force-reinstall a couple of X/gnome related package to narrow down the problem, but none of the obvious package reinstall fixed it. I therefore used a script to force-reinstall the whole system (the package already installed) and that fixed it.

Sorry, I can't really therefore know what was wrong with the installer, and I didn't have the patience to rerun it with a strace to spy on it, but something was messing up the ubuntu 17.10 somewhere.
If I could get access to the installer's source code, maybe I could take a look to see if I can see how this happened?

[Juan Conejero]

This has never been reported before and cannot be reproduced. I see no way this could happen with the installer program. It fully adheres to freedesktop.org standards.

Anyway, the X11 installer program has been released as an open-source component of PixInsight. Its source code is available at our official GitHub repositories:

https://github.com/PixInsight/PCL/tree/master/src/installer/x11

Please let me know if you find something wrong with this code.

[ChoJin]

Thanks, I'll take a look.

Indeed, I was very surprised considering I was running a standard ubuntu 17.10, and I couldn't believe either I was the first one to try that ;-)

The only non-standard thing I can think of, is that I was encrypting my home directory (with ecryptfs). Otherwise it was a standard install.

I'll take a look at the code, and see if I see anything wrong. Otherwise, I'll try to debug this issue once I get a chance.

Thanks Juan.
PS: I had a "parallel code" PCL-related question in the PCL sub-forum, just in case you didn't see it, and you're probably one of the few who can answer me ;-)

[ajniskan]

Second Error:

/opt/PixInsight/bin/lib/libz.so.1: version `ZLIB_1.2.9' not found (required by /lib64/libpng16.so.16)

Fix:

rename the libz.so file in PixInsight's bin/lib directory          cd PixInsight/bin/lib;mv libz.so.1 libz.so.1.xx

Reinstall PixInsight again.

Hi Dwight, and thanks for sharing! I, too, got hit with this on latest Fedora. The second part just didn't work for me for whatever reason. What I did instead:

cd /opt/Pixinsight/bin/lib/

ln -s /usr/lib64/libz.so.1.2.11 libz.so.1

Which creates a soft link to the latest libz.1.2.11 that came with Fedora.

regards,
Antti

[ajniskan]

Second Error:

/opt/PixInsight/bin/lib/libz.so.1: version `ZLIB_1.2.9' not found (required by /lib64/libpng16.so.16)

Fix:

rename the libz.so file in PixInsight's bin/lib directory          cd PixInsight/bin/lib;mv libz.so.1 libz.so.1.xx

Reinstall PixInsight again.

Hi Dwight, and thanks for sharing! I, too, got hit with this on latest Fedora. The second part just didn't work for me for whatever reason. What I did instead:

cd /opt/Pixinsight/bin/lib/

ln -s /usr/lib64/libz.so.1.2.11 libz.so.1

Which creates a soft link to the latest libz.1.2.11 that came with Fedora.

regards,
Antti

Just quoting myself a bit and updating the info on latest Ubuntu LTS, the libz.1.2.11 is located in a slightly different location and the fix for it is:

ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1.2.11 libz.so.1
ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1.2.11 libz.so

regards,
Antti

[Conor]

FWIW, a caveat for anyone else reading this thread: Doing this is generally a _really bad_ idea. Shared object sonames change for a reason (usually a break in binary compatibility in the case of major versions). Doing this locally for PixInsight might work, but can introduce instability on your system if you do it elsewhere. The safest way to solve this problem would be to build the version which PixInsight dependencies require, and install them alongside PixInsight or in a directory you can add to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.