My problems installing Gimp
Hi,
Sorry to be joining this thread late. But I have had recent problems
installing Gimp on an update version of Knoppix/Debian Linux. It seems
that Gimp 2.0.1 was running just fine when I did a system upgrade which
changed a bunch of libraries as well as updating Gimp to 2.0.2. Now when
I execute Gimp, I get the message:
Bash ajax rozen [~] -> gimp
gimp: relocation error: gimp: undefined symbol: gdk_threads_lock
I downloaded the source but was unable to satisfy configure, which
thought that GTK+ was installed wrong. Still looking at that.
It seems to me that Gimp stopped working because it was dependent on a
bunch of libraries and somebody somewhere updated one of them but not
realizing that he might be effecting Gimp never bothered to test against
Gimp. That is a problem I have seen before with Debian. For instance,
I also hit the problem with Gnucash a couple of months ago. Fortunately,
someone posted the name and version of the offending library and I could
go back to a workable version. One might avoid it by sticking to only
the stable version but at the cost of running a bunch of old stuff; the
version of Gimp in the Stable distribution is 1.2. I regard the touted
reliability of Debian to be an illusion
Since adequate testing, like adequate documentation seems beyond the
ethos of Open Source, it would be great if it were possible to install a
program like Gimp in such a way that it would be isolated against a
change of an underlying library. Should I also compile and install in
/usr/local all the dependent libraries? Is there a way to tell the
system to use them when running Gimp rather than distribution versions?
Could some code be put into Gimp to flag a wayward library? Does anyone
know which library update caused my problem? Does anyone know a way to
track down the offender.
It seems that when one is dependent on many libraries, one has to expect
this sort of problem and try to help the end user as much as possible.
I don't mean this a flame but hope that it illuminates a big problem anyway.
Thanks in Advance for Any Suggestion that Gets Gimp Running
