Unable to launch some Gnome games in 10.04 LTS

[Enrico Rosina]

Binary package hint: gnome-games

Hello,

Just a problem I discovered trying the Games menu in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS:

Some of the games cannot be launched. (These games are in the official distribution, I did not add them)
- gnome-hearts
- glchess
- mahjongg (not sure of this one)
- gnibbles
- pacman
(I did not try all of them, but some could be launched and some not)

Example:

This message appears when trying to launch gnome-hearts:

   Impossible de lancer << Dame de Pique >>
   L'exécution du processus fils << gnome-hearts >> a échoué
   (Aucun fichier ou dossier de ce type)

Sorry I do not have official english message, I try to translate here from myself:

   Impossible to launch Hearts
   The execution of the child process "gnome-hearts" failed
   (No such file or directory)

I tried to find those games on the file system, and I found them in /usr/games/

So next step was to change the launcher: I Right-clicked on the application menu,
and I changed the command line, adding the directory prefix /usr/games/

So instead of:
   gnome-hearts
The new command is:
   /usr/games/gnome-hearts

Then bingo, with this modification the games can be launched.
Is this a common failure or is it just on my distribution? I did not find another bug report for this...

Thank you for your answer
Enrico

[Daniel Faulkner (daniel-faulkner)]

I don't have the same selection of games installed on my install. Did you perform a clean install or did you upgrade from ubuntu 9.10 or from an alpha/beta release of ubuntu 10.04?

[Enrico Rosina (e-rosina)]

Hello Daniel,

Thank you for your concern. I upgraded from an older version. It's a long time i have Ubuntu now. Last version I used was 8.04, but i had also older versions before.

To upgrade from 8.04, I simply used the update manager from the system menu. I had three upgrades in a row, during the same week-end I migrated to 9.04, then 9.10 and finally 10.04 (without really using them, I just did one boot to see it was ok).

Now that I think of it, I am not really sure which of the games were in the original version and which ones I installed using the applications menu. Sorry I cannot be more accurate than that, I had to purge linux versions because I had no place anymore in the / directory. But I am sure I always used the Ubuntu applications menu to install them, I never installed picking packages directly from the internet.

Have a nice evening.
Enrico

[Enrico Rosina (e-rosina)]

Hello again,

I found out the CD which I used to install my first version of Ubuntu. It was:

#define DISKNAME Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn" - Release i386

If you are interested, i could try to install it on an empty old PC, to check what games were inside. I'm ready to do the effort, because in fact I have a second thought to use it as a backup system .

Have a nice day / evening / morning / week-end (please select the one you prefer)
Enrico

[Daniel Faulkner (daniel-faulkner)]

You can get an idea of what was installed in earlier releases by going to http://packages.ubuntu.com and searching for the gnome-games package. The description and the dependancies list the games that are normally installed with that version of ubuntu.

I suspect in your case the issue was that when upgrading between releases at some point the menu items weren't updated. Unfortunatly as you performed multiple upgrades I'm not sure which version you were upgrading to when this happened, assuming you didn't check between upgrades.

Thank you for adding this extra information to the bug report as I'm sure it will help to diagnose it further.

Good day/night to you also.

Daniel

[Enrico Rosina (e-rosina)]

Hello,

Just in case it helps, here are the games which were on Ubuntu 7.2.04 distribution:
(with the command line appearing in the applications editing menu). I tried to launch all of them, they were ok, also the 2 ones which did not have full path as command line.

AisleRiot Solitaire /usr/games/sol
Blackjack /usr/games/blackjack
Chess /usr/games/glchess
Five or More /usr/games/glines
Four-in-a-Row /usr/games/gnect
FreeCell Solitaire /usr/games/sol --variation freecell
Gnometris /usr/games/gnometris
Iagno /usr/games/iagno
Klotski /usr/games/gnotski
Mahjongg /usr/games/mahjongg
Mines /usr/games/gnomine
Nibbles gnibbles
Robots gnobots2
Same GNOME /usr/games/same-gnome
Sudoku /usr/games/gnome-sudoku
Tali /usr/games/gtali
Tetravex /usr/games/gnotravex

Now it is impossible for me to tell which upgrade failed, because the version 7.2.04 cannot be upgraded to next version (the update manager fails).

I hope this helps, but maybe in your place I would discard this bug report, I think it's not really worth further investigations

Regards.
Enrico

[Daniel Faulkner (daniel-faulkner)]

I'm not really familiar enough with the gnome-games package to help further and I don't currently have enough spare time to try testing the same upgrades as you have applied so I don't think I could help further currently. But if it becomes a recurring issue and someone who is in a better position to investigate further wants to take this up the information here might help.

Thank you for reporting this bug, sorry I couldn't help further but the information here might help someone else in the future.

Daniel

[Enrico Rosina (e-rosina)]

No problem at all, I also thought it was not so important for the moment.
Thank you for caring
Regards
Enrico

[Victor Vargas (kamus)]

I tried to reproduce this issue installing pacman package from repositories (and testing default gnome games) but works fine for me (but I have a fresh install of Ubuntu Lucid), maybe you should try to do a new installation of Lucid in your machine for avoid possible issues with old configurations that have been had in your system for years.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I'm marking this as invalid because it is not a gnome-games bug. The launcher shortcuts should point to, for instance, gnome-hearts not /usr/games/gnome-hearts.

If you are unable to start games, then you need to make sure /usr/games/ is in your $PATH which it is by default.

[Enrico Rosina (e-rosina)]

No problem at all, I already said this in a previous post:

"[...] maybe in your place I would discard this bug report, I think it's not really worth further investigations"

Thank you all for having spent time on this.
Enrico