The Site With the Lamp

October 22, 2004

I wrote a couple of days back about trouble installing firefox, the error message ./firefox-installer-bin: relocation error: /usr/local/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: pango_find_base_dir wasn't in google's index.

There were less than 10 results for the second half of that error message relocation error: /usr/local/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: pango_find_base_dir. Of course these were related to some other applications and not to firefox, but one of them seemed to indicate that having two installations of pango could be the problem.

I did have the RPM of pango-1.2.1-3 as wel as pango-1.4.0 installed from source (as part of my (botched) attempt to upgrade to gnome 2.6). At the time I didn't uninstall pango-1.2.1-3 because it had a list of dependencies as long as your arm. Now is the time to take the plunge, or so it seemed.

After uninstalling the RPM, saving this entry and shutting down mozilla, i tried the installer again. This time it went a few steps before grinding to a halt with a different error.

Google has hundreds of entries for this one, unfortunately none of them carry the tag 'solved'. The best suggestion i ran into after shifting through about 30 useless posts was to use the non-installer version. When you visit mozilla.org it insists on giving you an installer but there is a non installer version which you will find if you take a peek at the ftp server where the download originates from.

Indeed installing the non-installer version did indeed turn out to be the solution to the xpistub problem. The last paragraphi in this entry is being typed in using firefox. The default theme though tidy looks a bit old fashioned.

Follow up: The java plugin