Messages reported by applications and OperatingSystems?

This page tells you how to resolve problems in some applications if you receive strange/weird error messages or conditions.

You might also be interested in the FunnyApplicationErrorMessages wiki page. See also CommonErrors and ErrorMessages (for POSIX/libc error conditions).

Sawfish/Sawfish-gnome

• If you do not get a drop-down menu when you click on a window's menu button, can't change the number of workspaces, and/or gnome-control-center says "the applet encountered an error" when you try to configure sawfish, it means that you have versions of sawfish and rep (and/or rep-gtk[-gnome??) that don't like each other. For example, you have sawfish from debian woody (stable) but a rep from debian testing or unstable, even though these packages don't have an official conflict. Other symptoms include lines like "No such file or directory, sawfish/client" from the command line or in your .xsession-errors file.

SSH/OpenSSH/scp(1) etc

• If you get an error "no matching comp found: client zlib server none" then what this means is that you tried to use compression but the ssh server refused. This might be because you had the "-C" option on the command line, or you have "Compression" in your /.ssh_options file. This might mean that there are different versions of ssh installed on the two machines, or different versions of libssl. Not trying to use compression will work around this.
• "Disconnecting: bad packet length 1349676916." (or similar) means there was a protocol error, normally due to conflicting versions of ssh on the two machines. For example, I get this from a laptop running Slackware version 7 (where OpenSSH-1.2 only supports ssh protocol 1.5) when trying to ssh to a machine running Slackware 8 (with OpenSSH-3.4 and only using ssh protocol 2).

Evolution (and some other gnome programs)

Symptom: No text is printed when you print out a document. In evolution, you only get the grey box where the headers would be but no text. This is caused by gimp-print (the printing back-end) not being able to find the fonts used in the document. (The application gets its fonts from either the X(1) server or from the font server xfs(1)?).

For me, this occurred when I installed Microsoft truetype fonts into /usr/share/fonts/truetype and configured X to look there. Unfortunately, gnome-font-install(1) doesn't look in that directory, you so need to manually update the font settings. Under Debian 3.0 (woody) I did this by (as root)

1. pick up new share/fonts truetypes

gnome-font-install -r -t /usr/share/gnome/fonts/gnome-print-share.fontmap /usr/share/fonts

1. update /etc/gnome/fonts

rm /etc/gnome/fonts/gnome-print.fontmap gnome-font-install --dynamic

GNOME 2.x - various sound applications

GStreamer-ERROR **: No default scheduler name - do you have a registry ? aborting...

Gnome 2 has moved to using the gstreamer suite for audio processing, including recording and playback. I got the above error message when trying to use gnome-sound-recorder. What happened (possibly debian specific) was that gnome-media depends on libgstreamer but not all the required gstreamer packages got installed. The extra packages I installed were

gstreamer-core gstreamer-tools gstreamer-oss (you might prefer gstreamer-alsa or gstreamer-arts) gstreamer-runtime

to get it not to crash, and some extra packages to actually get stuff working

gstreamer-misc gstreamer-plugin-libs

Note - this was for the gnome2.2 back port for Debian 3.0 Woody. Other versions/distributions probably have different dependencies/package names.

tar: Failed open to read on /dev/nrst0 <No such file or directory>

You're using a BSD-derived tar, but using GNU-tar options - it got confused and is trying to use the default tape drive device. See PortableProgramming? for tar option discussion.