[Techtalk] gnome, nautilus, sawfish & metacity???

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

On Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 05:51:00AM -0500, Erin Raasch wrote:
> On Monday 09 September 2002 03:19, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
[...]
> > I have not seen this problem, but what happens when you just run
> > nautilus from a terminal in GNOME 1.4? Any obvious error messages. There
> > are a number of things that _could_ be going wrong, like portions (or
> > all) of GNOME 2's Nautilus being picked up by accident, but I can't say
> > for sure.
> 
> eraasch at xalice:~> /opt/gnome/bin/nautilus
> Message: OAF error activating component: Child process did not give an error 
> message, unknown failure occurred
> 
> ** WARNING **: Throbber Activation exception 'Unknown CORBA exception id: 
> 'IDL:OAF/GeneralError:1.0''
> Segmentation fault

OK, so it's official ... something is wrong. It's going to be really hard to
work this one out remotely, too, I suspect, so what follows are pretty much
straight out of the "wild ass guesses" box. Try running

	rpm -qa | grep -E "oaf|nautilus" | xargs rpm -V

(which verifies the status of all packages concerning oaf and nautilus) and see
if any problems pop up (have a look at the rpm manual page to see what the
output symbols mean).

> > You might also look at the output of 'ldd $(which nautilus)' to ensure
> > that no GNOME 2 libraries are linked against it (which will involve
> > knowing the general prefix under which your GNOME 2 libraries are
> > installed). This could be a bit painful, since there are 54 libraries
> > linked against the version of Nautilus I have here. :(
> 
> eraasch at xalice:~> ldd $(which nautilus)
[... long list snipped ...]

> Yikes!  It is a bit lengthy, isn't it?  My ignorance in this area is
> vast, but it does look as though it's got bits of both gnome2's and
> gnome1.4's libs mixed in - but what to do next?  Is it possible to
> disentangle the two versions of nautilus so I can run them alongside
> one another?  Or can the newer version be made to run in gnome1.4?   

The list of libraries does makes it look like things have gone a bit awry.

My main observation, however, is that this looks like the library list
for Nautilus for GNOME 2. So your $PATH is set up so that
/opt/gnome2/bin/nautilus is found before /opt/gnome/bin/nautilus (if I
understand the SuSE install locations correctly). You really need to run
'ldd' on the nautilus for GNOME 1 (so /opt/gnome/bin/nautilus) -- sorry
for the confusion about that.

To answer your final question, it's unclear if the GNOME 2 Nautilus will
run on a predominantly GNOME 1 base. There is no real reason it
shouldn't, providing it sucks in the right libraries (the GNOME 2
versions, not the GNOME 1 versions), but there might be some path
problems (such as the places it searches for Bonobo components, by the
look of the error message you posted above). Fifteen months or so ago,
everybody who was working on GNOME 2 stuff was having to run things over
a GNOME 1 base, since things like the window managers and session
manager had not yet been ported. But it was not trivially easy and I
have blocked out a lot of the tricks and traps now that I try to
remember it.

If you really want to get Nautilus working under 1.4 again, try this:
remove all references to /opt/gnome2 from your path and library paths
(even temporarily edit /etc/ld.so.conf and remove /opt/gnome2/libs if it
is in there and then run 'ldconfig' to reinitialise the library cache --
but put it back later before you forget).  At that point, you can be
sure you are running only GNOME 1 stuff. Try to run Nautilus again. If
it still fails, I have no idea what to suggest, since your GNOME 1 setup
is a bit broken. If it works, then you know there are some interaction
problems between the two installs.

I'm a bit out of my depth here, since I set up my parallel install
myself, so I know where things are and what paths, etc, I need to change
to run which environment. I don't have any familiarity with SuSE's
setup, so there may be something obvious that I just cannot work out.

If everything still fails strangely and all the rpms verify, etc, mail
back to the list and I will try to think of some more things (and maybe
some else -- hint, hint! -- will have some ideas, too).

Cheers,
Malcolm