Penguin
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Messages reported by applications and OperatingSystem

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.

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 XServer 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(1)

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.

Galeon

Cannot find a schema for galeon preferences. Check your gconf setup, look at galeon FAQ for more info

If you get this message in a dialog when starting galeon, the problem is the interaction between galeon and gconf2. If I manually start gconf1 before starting galeon (try "gconfd-1 &" from the command line) then galeon starts fine. (If you add that command to the /usr/bin/galeon script then it should all work fine all the time).

(This happened after upgrading the gconf in debian testing as part of the move to GNOME version 2.4.)

gdm(8)

There already appears to be an X server running on display :0. Should I try another display number?

gdm prints this out after trying to start more than one XServer on :0. (It also prints "Display :0 is busy. There is another X server running already" into the syslog). I got this after upgrading gdm to version 2.4.something in debian testing. This message persisted, even after the laptop was rebooted. I eventually got rid of it - however I'm not entirely sure which of the following fixed it:

  • I upgraded the libgtk2.0-0, libgtk2.0-common and libbonobo2 packages.
  • After killing gdm and all X servers, I started "gdm" manually from the command line and then killed it.

After doing these two steps, gdm behaved properly when started from /etc/init.d/gdm. If you determine how to fix it, please edit this page!