fredvanner
Well-known member
Language
PixInsight Forum is an international user community. The only official language of this forum is English, and all posts must be made in that language.
not a bug Missing library after updating to latest update on Fedora 39
- Thread starter mborland
- Start date
PixInsight Forum is an international user community. The only official language of this forum is English, and all posts must be made in that language.
Yes, I tried that but does not work.
monos
Well-known member
I am sorry. My intention is to write in English but the translators have played a trick on me. I have corrected it. Thanks for warning me.
monos
Well-known member
When that happens, it may be because of some third party repository that gives problems. Try disabling them and try again. I'm doing it right now to upgrade from 23.10 to 24.03 and that's what happened to me.
It finally worked. Thank you.
I did that, I had a package that did not want to update and I disabled it. And then I did this:
- Make sure the Prompt line in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades is set to normal.
- Launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade.
- them the software updater GUI.
monos
Well-known member
I'm glad it worked. I just upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 and it worked fine after all. Naturally the latest version of PI doesn't work and gave the aforementioned error about the missing libunistring.so.2 file. Easy to solve by copying it to /opt/PixInsight/bin. Solved.
I think Juan is already working on a compilation to solve these small details.
Regards.
I think Juan is already working on a compilation to solve these small details.
Regards.
I was able to work around the problem by finding libunistring.so.2 in the flatpak area using
I then copied the file to /usr/lib64
Not very elegant, but it works for now. Fortunately, it didn't devolve into dependency hell. What I find very odd is that PixInsight suddenly depends on a very old version of a library. It suggests that it was built on a machine that isn't running an up-to-date version of linux.
On a related note, I work as part of a small team that creates free scientific software that runs on windows, mac, and linux. We have an old laptop with a bunch of VMs that we use to do automated builds for many variants. When a new version of some OS comes out, we just set up a new VM and gradually drop the old ones. This allows us to support the major linux distributions with little additional effort per distribution. If a user contacts us and needs another distribution added, it isn't a big deal.
In addition to providing good service to users, building for multiple versions and distributions is helpful from a software quality standpoint. Older compilers may miss code problems that are detected by newer compilers. When those are addressed, it can solve problems for users of older operating system versions.
--Michael
Code:
locate libunistring.so.2Not very elegant, but it works for now. Fortunately, it didn't devolve into dependency hell. What I find very odd is that PixInsight suddenly depends on a very old version of a library. It suggests that it was built on a machine that isn't running an up-to-date version of linux.
On a related note, I work as part of a small team that creates free scientific software that runs on windows, mac, and linux. We have an old laptop with a bunch of VMs that we use to do automated builds for many variants. When a new version of some OS comes out, we just set up a new VM and gradually drop the old ones. This allows us to support the major linux distributions with little additional effort per distribution. If a user contacts us and needs another distribution added, it isn't a big deal.
In addition to providing good service to users, building for multiple versions and distributions is helpful from a software quality standpoint. Older compilers may miss code problems that are detected by newer compilers. When those are addressed, it can solve problems for users of older operating system versions.
--Michael
monos
Well-known member
On the subject of wayland.... I have realised that I have been using PI under wayland for some time now. I haven't had any obvious problems with it and everything seems to work correctly. I just upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 and it continues to work fine under wayland, am I missing something, should I be logging into X11 for some important reason that escapes me?@Juan Conejero I completely understand that. I myself am a developer of a small FOSS project, and even I don't support all the DEs out there. For me it's easier though, I set a minimum version and then distros compile it themselves
About wayland, I guess that sooner or later you'll have to deal with that. Kubuntu 24.04 will stick with X11, but I highly doubt that 26.04 will still have X11 (or that KDE will even still support that). But hey, 24.04 will be supported until 2029 so plenty of time to think about it
PixInsight will run on X11, irrespective of your desktop compositing window manager or display server. It will simply force the use of X11, and hence requires a working X11/XCB implementation on the target machine.On the subject of wayland.... I have realised that I have been using PI under wayland for some time now. I haven't had any obvious problems with it and everything seems to work correctly. I just upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 and it continues to work fine under wayland, am I missing something, should I be logging into X11 for some important reason that escapes me?
That's actually false. As written in the system requirements page, PI is built and developed on Kubuntu 22.04, which provides that exact library version.
fredvanner
Well-known member
Kubuntu 22.04 is the most recent LTS (long term support) release. I would not expect PixInsight to update to a non-LTS release. I think the next LTS release is next month, but I would expect that updating to that release would take some time (e.g. for regression testing).
As Fred has pointed out, we cannot base our development work on unstable or 'bleeding edge' Linux distributions. We can only install and use long-term support (LTS) distributions on our development workstations and servers. We used Kubuntu 20.04 LTS until a few weeks ago when we updated all our machines to Kubuntu 22.04 LTS. We'll probably upgrade to 24.04 in 2026 or 2027 if we decide it's stable enough for our daily development tasks and releases.
This is professional software development and PixInsight is a large and complex application and development platform with hundreds of components, including many third-party components and libraries, some of them outstandingly huge and complex on their own (e.g., Qt). We basically cannot assume any risks. Things are already sufficiently difficult by themselves without additional help
FYI: I have just released version 1.8.9-2 build 1605, where I have included libtiff.so.5 and libunistring.so.2 in the installation bin/lib directory. Hopefully this will ease installation on those modern Linux distros that you are using. Let me know if you encounter other missing libraries.
Thanks. I now get
Code:
/opt/PixInsight/bin/PixInsight: error while loading shared libraries: libjbig.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory--Michael
I understand the appeal of the LTS model. Unfortunately, my experience with the LTS versions has been less than stellar. I ran pre-installed Ubuntu LTS on my System 76 machine for about a year until I got fed up with how frequently basic software, such as firefox, would break when I did a system update. I'd used Fedora for nearly 20 years before that and never saw such instability. Since switching back about 6 months ago, I haven't had a similar problem.As Fred has pointed out, we cannot base our development work on unstable or 'bleeding edge' Linux distributions. We can only install and use long-term support (LTS) distributions on our development workstations and servers. We used Kubuntu 20.04 LTS until a few weeks ago when we updated all our machines to Kubuntu 22.04 LTS. We'll probably upgrade to 24.04 in 2026 or 2027 if we decide it's stable enough for our daily development tasks and releases.
This is professional software development and PixInsight is a large and complex application and development platform with hundreds of components, including many third-party components and libraries, some of them outstandingly huge and complex on their own (e.g., Qt). We basically cannot assume any risks. Things are already sufficiently difficult by themselves without additional help
I suppose I could run PixInsight in a VM running Ubuntu, but that has its own problems for a program as resource-intensive as PixInsight.
--Michael
monos
Well-known member
Michael... Have you tried looking for the missing PI file on your system and copying an instance of it to /opt/PixInsight/bin and see if that solves the problem?
I'm telling you because in the previous version I had the same errors with libtiff and libunistring and just copying a copy solved the issue. I don't think you need a virtual machine with Kubuntu to solve something like that.
This kind of situation is quite typical of the idiosyncrasies of Linux. Sometimes it's a pain in the ass but on the other hand there are so many advantages that it's worth it. In my humble system, with an inexpensive mini PC, PI runs very well under Ubuntu while under Windows its performance is greatly reduced.
Regards.
