Ogg Theora question

[Matt Graham]

From: Dazed_75 <lthielster at gmail.com>
> Update: I moved the file to my laptop and find it plays just fine using the
> default "Movie Player" which does not work on the desktop.  Both are
running
> Ubuntu 7.04 although it was installed clean from a CD a few months back.
> The desktop machine was upgraded from 6.10 and has more software added to
> it.

Debian-based things are *supposed* to be infinitely upgradeable using apt-get
or aptitude or whatever.  Sad to see this is not the case for you.

> Sure would like to learn how to track down this kind of issue.

Why do people call problems "issues"?  I have asked this several times in
several
different fora, and have yet to receive a coherent response.

> Programs often fail
> silently and since many operate using other software components it can be
> very difficult to find out what is happening.  Certainly there are MANY
> benefits from this kind of architecture but this is a side effect that can
> be very troubling to the semi-learned.

The problems you describe are, AFAICT, inherent in anything that uses shared
libs.  They're just more visible in *nix because many shared libs get
upgraded
regularly, and this upgrade process can break dependencies.  This can even
happen in Gentoo, which is why they invented the "revdep-rebuild" script.  I
don't know what the Debian equivalent of this is, but you might need to find
out and run it.

The programs that I have seen fail in this manner don't fail silently.
They report "missing libfoo.1.2.3.so" errors to stderr, not to an X dialog,
which can confuse people.  "ldd fooprogram | grep 'not found' " can also
tell you which libraries are missing from fooprogram if fooprogram isn't
working.

(The most annoying recent dependency problem I've had was when hplip wouldn't
talk to an Ethernet-connected HP-3600, and gave completely bogus error
messages.  Turns out you need to build hplip with SNMP support for it to talk
to Ethernet-connected printers.  Oops.)