Cannot open shared object file while starting Gnucash

[rso]

Binary package hint: gnucash

With the update from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 there was also Gnucash being updated from 2.2.4 to 2.2.6. With version 2.2.4 I never had problems starting Gnucash. After the update to Ubuntu 8.10 and Gnucash 2.2.6 I can't start Gnucash anymore and I get an error message:
"gnucash-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libgnc-qof.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

The stated file "libgnc-qof.so.1" is installed. Reinstalling didn't help.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Thanks for your bug report. Can you give us the output of the following commands in a terminal?

dpkg -S libgnc-qof
sudo ldconfig

Can you also test if gnucash works after this?

[rso (reto-schoch)]

After I ran the stated commands I still have the same error message starting up Gnucash.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Very hard here to see where is the problem since the libraries are there, ldconfig does not seem to fail and the package seem correctly installed. I can't see any other exemple of this problem in Google, so that's unusual. I'm pretty sure that the problem is not gnucash itself but something broken in the library system of your installation (or something broke normal permissions of files). However, I don't have necessary knowledge to help you search more on this. I can only tell you that backuping your home directory and re-installing ubuntu would be a definitive solution to the problem since no other users have this problem.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

(However if you find more information about the problem and that it's not caused by accidental damages on your ubuntu installation, this would be very interesting to know).

[andi5 (andi5)]

You could try to run gnucash with strace, i.e. edit the last line of /usr/bin/gnucash and use "strace -o /tmp/myfile gnucash-bin...". Maybe /tmp/myfile contains some valuable information then. Just an idea before you reinstall :-)

[rso (reto-schoch)]

Saïvann was right, it's not Gnucash, but my installation. If I don't start Gnucash with the command gnucash but with /usr/bin/gnucash the application starts up just fine. Though $PATH lists /usr/bin, I have to apply this modification to the startup-command. It seems to be something wrong with the mapping.
Thanks to the hint of andi5 I found this out.
So thanks for your help ... and sorry for bothering with a non-bug - but the indication of the error-message seemed doubtless.

[Saivann Carignan (oxmosys)]

Thank you very much for keeping your bug report up to date. While it was not a genuine bug this time, it could have been one so don't hesitate to post new bug report again in the future.

[Ron HD (ronhd)]

I just ran into this same problem in Kubuntu 16.04, in the process of migrating from PCLinuxOS. The same solution also worked for me.

The command "which gnucash" revealed that I have a script in my ~/bin that was used to work around a problem in a previous gnucash problem (IIRC, the guile library was missing). Removing this script resolved the issue.