Midnight Commander fails to open

[John Hill]

I've just installed Midnight Commander via apt-get from http://mirror.arrnet.edu.au/pub/ubuntu/archive, and it shows up in Accessories group. A click on MC in Accessories results in ROXTerm window opening with Error from ROXTerm stating:

The new terminal's command failed to run: Failed to execute child process "-e" (No such file or directory) - and that's it.
This is repeatable.
Interestingly, I can open mc from via command line in XTerm and ROXTerm

apt-cache policy pkgname$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS
Release: 12.04

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: roxterm 1.22.2-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-60.91-generic 3.2.55
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-60-generic i686
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu17.6
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Mar 27 13:09:32 2014
MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: roxterm
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Tony Houghton (h-realh)]

That sounds familiar. I think I fixed a command-line parsing bug some while back. Please try the latest version from my PPA at <https://launchpad.net/~h-realh/+archive/roxterm>.

[John Hill (johnh)]

Add PPA as suggested and installed latest version of Roxterm ( 2.8.1-1ppa1) via Synaptic Package Manager - and then tried launching MC from Accessories and got thesame error message:

The new terminal's command failed to run: Failed to execute child process "-e" (No such file or directory)

[Tony Houghton (h-realh)]

Are you sure it wasn't still running the old roxterm? If there were any old terminals still open running roxterm again would have reused the same instance instead of running a new one.

I can't reproduce this in Debian with GNOME 3. Can you do something to confirm the command line being sent to roxterm? Eg:

sudo mv /usr/bin/roxterm /usr/bin/roxterm.bak

and create a new /usr/bin/roxterm something like:

#!/bin/sh
echo "$@" > ~/roxterm-log
exec /usr/bin/roxterm.bak "$@"

[John Hill (johnh)]

Carried out command line as suggested above:

Result: Can't open MC from Accessories - but without an error message and can't open MC from desktop icon but with the error message: Failed to execute child process "-e" (No such file or directory)

Next step?

[John Hill (johnh)]

The only roxterm files in /usr/bin/ are: roxterm and roxterm-config. if a log was generated where would it be?
Had a look at roxterm-config with nano - nothing in it.
Had a look at roxterm.bak with nano - and it is full of giberish, well giberish to me, certainly not plain text.

[Tony Houghton (h-realh)]

Did you make the script (new /usr/bin/roxterm) executable? The log will be in your home directory called roxterm-log.

[John Hill (johnh)]

All I did was input the following lines in to Terminal

#!/bin/sh
echo "$@" > ~/roxterm-log
exec /usr/bin/roxterm.bak "$@"

I don't understand about making some executable!
You will need to be explicit with command line directions. I'm a Linux newbee.
roxterm-log is in my home directory - but it contains nothing.
The Menu shows Terminal however Roxterm is no longer available!

I can load MC from XTerm via System Tools

[Tony Houghton (h-realh)]

I want you to create a script file which acts as a wrapper for the original /usr/bin/roxterm, so run a text editor and enter these lines:

#!/bin/sh
echo "$@" >> ~/roxterm-log
exec /usr/bin/roxterm.bak "$@"

(Note I've changed the > to >>. The difference is that >> will add to the log file every time you run roxterm, > makes a new log file every time.)

Save the file in your home directory and call it roxterm.script. The name doesn't really matter, just as long as you use the proper name in the next command. Then in a terminal (I suppose you'll have to use gnome-terminal or xterm for now) enter:

sudo cp roxterm.script /usr/bin/roxterm
sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/roxterm

Now hopefully roxterm will run again and each time it's called the command line should be logged to roxterm-log in your home directory.