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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.

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.

This happened again (much later) while running Debian Testing. The answer is to run the command "gst-register" or "gst-register-0.6", although this should be done on package installation.

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.) Note that galeon (gtk1 version) is pretty obsolete now. The only reason I was still using it was because there was no GTK2 browser for GNOME in debian testing. Now, at least, epiphany-browser is there, and the galeon from unstable can also be installed if you also grab a few extra libraries from unstable.

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!

2004-05-14 9:43 EST The correct way to deal with this problem is:

  • Enable "debug" in your /etc/gdm/gdm.conf file under:

[debug?

# This will enable debugging into the syslog, usually not neccessary and it creates a LOT of spew of random stuff to the syslog. However it can be useful in determining when something is going very wrong.

Enable=true

Then your messages will be logged to /var/log/syslog.

  • GDM has to always restart X with an entry like the following in gdm.conf:

[daemon?

AlwaysRestartServer?=true

  • and finally, make sure that you have the following under the same daemon section:

# Automatic VT allocation. Right now only works on Linux. This way we force X to use specific vts. turn VTAllocation to false if this is causing problems.

FirstVT=7 VTAllocation=false

# Should double login be treated with a warning (and possibility to change vts on linux systems for console logins)

DoubleLoginWarning?=false

That should be enough to at least know what the source of the problem is. Please note that the latest Debian gdm as of this writing, has issues with udev. So if you have udev generating /dev/vc* block files for you (and removing them when you close X), gdm can't get a hold on running X servers and it let's them running, trying to launch another one in a different vts! Therefore, you will have a few servers running in vt6, vt7, vt8, ..., vtN. The way to "kill them" without having to login in a console (vty1) is to "CTRL+ALT+FN", where N is the number of the vt. Say, for vt8: CTRL+ALT+F8. Once you are there, if you see an X server running (you will be able to move the mouse, but no other application might be running), hit CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE to kill it. Do the same with the others you may find.

Hopefully somebody else might be able to write a better solution for this ;-). Or I'll come back once I find a more concrete answer. If you are the kind who avoids typing, you might want to make a copy of the factory-gdm.conf file, found under /etc/gdm.


CategoryErrors