ekiga won't start: it cant locate libx264.so.67 in Lucid

[gene]

Binary package hint: ekiga

the error message when run in the terminal :
h264_video_pwplugin_helper: error while loading shared libraries: libx264.so.67: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: ekiga 3.2.6-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-22.33-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-22-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun May 9 22:36:45 2010
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ekiga

[gene (eugenios)]

Forgot to mention that ekiga creates a zombie process:
ps -el | grep Z

F S UID PID PPID C PRI NI ADDR SZ WCHAN TTY TIME CMD
0 Z 1000 2070 2069 0 80 0 - 0 exit ? 00:00:00 h264_video_pwpl <defunct>
0 Z 1000 2074 2073 0 80 0 - 0 exit ? 00:00:00 h264_video_pwpl <defunct>

--

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[Yannick Defais (sevmek)]

Hi,

The intent of devs is as follow:
The H264 codec is an OPAL library plugin, it requires ffmpeg and x264 libraries. Ekiga check if it is available at *runtime*, thus the error message. AFAIK this is not a bug.

I'm not sure having this piece of code being a zombie is the intented behavior. I'll push that issue upstream. Can you be more explicit about it: when you close Ekiga is it still there as a zombie?

Best regards,
Yannick

[Yannick Defais (sevmek)]

BTW, this piece of code is a new process only because of license issue between OPAL Vs x264.

[gene (eugenios)]

Hi Yannick,
The problem is that ekiga refuses to work at ALL! Its applet does not show up. If run from the terminal it exits with the error I attached. So it is a bug. I cannot close it, simply because it does not start.
>>The H264 codec is an OPAL library plugin, it requires ffmpeg and x264 libraries
this might be a problem, I did not do the update manually, so the upgrade script did it for me. Mplayer also uses ffmpeg. I did not have problems with so far, though can't remember trying anything h264.
As a matter of fact linphone works flawlessly.
Thanks

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[gene (eugenios)]

There is no libx246.so.67 on my system:

$locate libx264.
/usr/lib/libx264.a
/usr/lib/libx264.so
/usr/lib/libx264.so.85
/usr/lib/i686/sse2/libx264.so.85

If I search for *67 on the net I find it to be older version. Is it the case? Also apt-get gives this. So somehow the libopal plugin tries to check for an obsolete library?
$ apt-cache search libx264
libx264-85 - x264 video coding library
libx264-dev - development files for libx264

Off-topic: This is not the only magic I'm experiencing with current Ubuntu. Alas, as far as the performance, stability and boot time are concerned, from one dist-upgrade to another for me it is all going down surely and not so slowly...

[gene (eugenios)]

OK, I managed to solve this problem by creating the link
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2010-05-20 02:05 /usr/lib/libx264.so.67 -> libx264.so.85

by cd'ing to and :
/usr/lib$ sudo ln -s libx264.so.85 ./libx264.so.67

Anyways, it seems to be a dependency bug in the libopal code that requires an older version of libx264 67 instead of 85
Please make sure it is fixed. I am not mark marking it "fixed" until it is done.