Miscellaneous Linux notes

Most of the notes below pertain to Fedora Core 1 or versions of Red Hat Linux.

Problems running Evolution

When starting Evolution, I received the following errors:

Cannot activate component OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_Addressbook_ShellComponent :
The error from the activation system is:
Unknown CORBA exception id: 'IDL:omg.org/CORBA/INV_OBJREF:1.0'

(evolution:2213): e-utils-WARNING **: e_config_listener_set_bool: Adding client to server's list failed, CORBA error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0

To fix the problems, remove the /tmp/orbit-$USER directory, restart X, and run Evolution again.

Problems installing scrollkeeper RPM

error: %post(scrollkeeper-0.3.12-2) scriptlet failed, exit status 0

If installation of the scrollkeeper RPM appears to hang, check /etc/xml/catalog to make sure that it is not a 0-byte file. If the file is 0-bytes, see if /etc/xml/catalog.rpmnew or another valid copy of /etc/xml/catalog exists in the /etc/xml directory. Replace the 0-byte file if applicable. /etc/xml/catalog is part of the xml-common package.

Error messages from /var/log/scrollkeeper.log:

file:///etc/xml/catalog:1: error: Document is empty

^
file:///etc/xml/catalog:1: error: Start tag expected, '<' not found

Problem running Nvu 0.1 on Fedora Core 1

./nvu-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Make sure the libstdc++ RPM is installed, and create a symbolic link from /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5.0.5 to /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.3:

ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5.0.5 /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.3

Compiling K3b 0.11.2 on Fedora Core 1

K3b 0.11.2 is the first version of K3b that correctly writes Video DVDs (VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories) if you have already extracted video object files. At the time of this writing, no binary package of K3b 0.11.2 was available from http://k3b.xcyb.org/.

To compile K3b 0.11.2, I had to install the following RPMs and their dependencies (I am running KDE 3.2):

qt-devel
arts-devel
kdelibs-devel
libogg-devel
esound-devel
libvorbis-devel
libart_lgpl-devel
libmng-devel
fam-devel

I had to run ./configure --with-qt-dir=/usr/lib/qt-3.2 for the configure script to find the required Qt headers. After installing the RPMs and running the configure command above, I was able to compile and install K3b 0.11.2.

error: execution of %preun scriptlet from package failed, exit status 1

If an rpm cannot be removed because of a script failure (pre-uninstallation in this example), use the --noscripts flag to remove the RPM. --noscripts is equivalent to --nopre --nopost --nopreun --nopostun.
rpm -e --noscripts package

To see the scripts associated with an RPM, use --scripts when querying a package.
rpm -q --scripts package

"Floating point exception" when starting GNU parted

If you receive a Floating point exception error when starting GNU parted, make sure that your CD/DVD drives are empty.

More information:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/238261

Removing mutiple RPM packages

For some reason, the Red Hat, Inc public gpg key was installed twice on one of my systems:

rpm -qa *gpg-pubkey* | sort
gpg-pubkey-db42a60e-37ea5438
gpg-pubkey-db42a60e-37ea5438

Since these packages have an identical name, the RPM --allmatches option must be used to remove these packages.

rpm -e gpg-pubkey-db42a60e-37ea5438
error: "gpg-pubkey-db42a60e-37ea5438" specifies multiple packages

rpm -e gpg-pubkey-db42a60e-37ea5438 --allmatches

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