Latest release errors... [SOLVED]

[Conor]

Greetings community

The latest release of PI is causing me indigestion on Arch Linux x86_64
Once again, I find myself polluting my filesystem with spurious symlinks
to satisfy PI's dependencies. Just downloaded the kerberos library source
and built/installed it. PI still won't run:

/usr/lib/libkrb5.so.3: version `krb5_3_MIT' not found

I'd really like to see version independent external library deps. This is getting
ridiculous. I'd happily code you an authentication module that doesn't
require a certain version of an outdated security library and lunar phase to run
successfully. </rant>

Returning to the problem at hand, has anyone got any ideas as to how to
proceed from here? I feel a bit cheated that I payed the guts of €200 to
reinvent the wheel everytime there's a release... I'm not dissatisfied with PI
at all, don't get me wrong, it's the most awesome piece of software. Just this
same rigmarole is really starting to get on my nerves...

[Edit]
Resolved. See below.

[Conor]

After hacking around for a while, I figured I'd just use the libraries
PI uses that are installed on my system rather than those that are
packaged with PI (bin/lib). Provided you can work out the deps yourself,
bearing in mind I had to build some libraries from source as they
weren't contained in my distro's repo, this should work for all you
other rolling release Linux/BSD users out there.

The fix is relatively straightforward, if you don't consider the symlink
creation and compiling libraries from source. Edit the PixInsight.sh
bash script in the PI directory and alter the line

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$dirname/lib:$dirname

so that it reads

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$dirname

For any novice Linux users out there, this will link against libraries
found elsewhere in your $PATH rather than those in the PI lib
directory.

That's it. After all the other hackery, this is what finally made it work.
It might be worthwhile to have argument parsing in this script so that
you could specify which set of libraries you'd like to use. Now, onward
with PI-foo!

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Conor,

Please realize that there are lots of Linux distros out there, and ensuring that a complex application like PixInsight will run out-of-the-box on all of them is not an easy task.

The new version 1.6.9 of PixInsight is guaranteed to run out-of-the-box on Fedora 13/14 and Ubuntu 10.10 (these are the distributions that I have tested, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions). In addition, PixInsight 1.6.9 runs nicely on FreeBSD 8.1.

I'll download Arch Linux to add it to my testing virtual machines.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$dirname

Glad to know it's running for you after this change. However I don't recommend using the Qt libraries provided by your distribution with PixInsight. This can cause incompatibilities, especially under KDE. The Qt libraries that are bundled with PixInsight are custom builds with no rpath and high optimization. In addition, if you replace them please make sure you use the same version or higher (Qt >= 4.7.1 for PI 1.6.9).

[Conor]

Hey Juan

Having worked on many cross-platform applications - both commercial and
open source - I have a great deal of experience in this area. I'm not
inclined to agree with you regarding supporting a wide range of distros.
Packages additional to the kernel are written to run on all distros of
Linux and BSD with Linux binary compatibility or explicitly on BSD. They
all adhere to the POSIX standard to some degree. I think that most of the
work concerning dependencies could be done external to PI in the form of
scripts to ensure the existence of libraries of a minimal version on a
given system. This would be similar to the GNU Autotools utility configure.
Alternative to this could be a flag which you can pass to the PI startup
script to instruct it to use the system libraries instead of those
packaged with PI.


Arch is a rolling release distro; So, for the most part, obtaining the
latest builds of the dependencies is trivial as they're in the repos.
Failing this, there is usually a PKGBUILD script in the AUR or one can
download the source and build it themselves.

I'd be more than happy to help out with testing as I mentioned in our
email correspondence as I think PI is an awesome piece of software, and
I'd love to give up some of my spare time and help out.

I wasn't expecting an answer over the holidays, so I am most appreciative.
I hope you're having a good one!

C.