Methodology or Philosophy of Troubleshooting

[der.hans]

Am 05. Aug, 2001 schwäzte Eric Van Buskirk so:

> I loaded RH 7.1 on my laptop (again).  Linuxconf was somehow not installed,
> so I installed it via rpm ("rpm -ih linuxfonf-1.24r2-10.i386.rpm").  But rpm
> would not install it because it failed a dependency: it first wanted "gd."
> So I installed gd-2.0.1-1.i386.rpm.  Then I typed "linuxconf" and the

Good that you didn't just nodeps it. Very good :).

> following error message was displayed: ""linuxconf: error while loading
> shared libraries: libgd.so.1.8: cannot load shared object file: No such file
> or directory".
> 
> Not knowing what the hell that meant, I loaded libgd-1.3-4.i386.rpm which
> seemingly had not been loaded during the original install.  Still, however,
> I receive the same error message when I type "linuxconf."

OK, do you have a libgd.so.1.8 on your box at this point? libdg-1.3-4 would
say you don't.

find / | grep libgd

It should probably be somewhere under /lib or /usr/lib. If the version you
have is less than 1.8, then you need to locate an rpm of newer version. If
what you have is newer than 1.8, then you need to either find an older
version or cheat. Finding the older version being the better option.

Now it could be that the linuxconf rpm has an incorrect dependency. Search
google and the RedHat bug tracking system to see if anybody else has had
this problem.

If the version linuxconf wants is on your system run "ldconfig -v | grep
libgd" and make sure it shows up. If it does and linuxconf still doesn't
work after running ldconfig, then pipe the ldconfig -v to tail and find out
what directory the one that shows up is in.

Use file to verify that it is a shared object or a link to a shared object.
Verify which RPM the lib comes from and start searching for bug reports for
it or linuxconf. Also, see if you can find anything else that use that lib.
Search RPM dependencies for something that depends on libgd, then use ldd on
it to see if it also depends on libgd.1.8. If it does and it works,
concentrate on linuxconf.

> So I thought maybe I should look at the source code (is that how problems
> like this are solved)??? But I am not sure which file to look at.  I don't
> even know how to look at linuxconf , as I don't know where it is ("find
> / -name linuxconf*" did not turn it up).

Install the source RPM. I think the source gets tossed somewhere under
/usr/src/RPMS. Maybe that's /usr/src/SRPMS.

ciao,

der.hans
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