[Techtalk] debian and shared libraries

[Wim De Smet]

On 7/20/07, Maria McKinley <maria at shadlen.org> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I installed a deb package, which fails with the following error message:
>
> /usr/sbin/afacli: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5:
> cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
>
> However, libncurses.so.5 does exist
>
> maude:~# ls /lib/libnc*
> /lib/libncurses.so.5    /lib/libncursesw.so.5
> /lib/libncurses.so.5.6  /lib/libncursesw.so.5.6
>
> I have no idea how to go about telling the program where to look for the
> library. Not sure to even find out where the program is currently
> looking. Someone told me they thought it was some weirdness with the way
> debian handles shared libraries and paths. Anyone know anything about this?

No debian should do that all just fine. Try running ldd on the binary
(ldd /usr/sbin/afacli) to see to how it resolves. That might give us
some more information. Sometimes permissions on directories get
screwed up and ld can't do its work (but usually not on /lib). Make
sure they're all in order. Can't really think of anything else right
now, but the output of ldd might certainly be interesting.

greets,
Wim