[mythtv-users] My new best friend: strace

Richard Shaw hobbes1069 at gmail.com
Mon May 10 12:46:07 UTC 2010


Originally posed on the fedora mailing list but figured others might
find this useful:

Since I follow the list religiously I've seen reference to strace on
several occasions but not till this weekend did I have a use for it
myself.

Quick intro... I got tired of 64bit huludesktop/flash not working for
me (on my F12 x86_64 systems) so I decided to install the 32bit
version instead. All went pretty smooth on my desktop so I must have
had all the critical dependencies already installed from some other
32bit package.

Then I did the same thing on my MythTV box. First it kept complaining
about not being able to find libflashplayer.so even though I put a
copy of it in my home directory and had it setup correctly in
".huludesktop" So after playing around with it a bit getting nowhere I
decided to try

ldd libflashsupport

and low and behold I had several "not found"'s. So after fixing all of
those via "yum whatprovides..." It finally "found flash" but then
started giving me segmentation faults. After trying things like
"ldconfig" and rebooting going nowhere I remember someone on the list
using strace to figure out why something was crashing so I figured
what the heck.

There was so much information flying past it took me a minute but I
starting seeing some other libraries that it was not finding so after
yumming those in it finally worked!

I was very surprised that even though I installed both huludesktop
from an rpm and flash from the adobe yum repo that I still had to
manually bring in dependencies, but oh well. I wonder what else I've
learned without even knowing it though "osmosis" reading the mailing
list.

Thanks,
Richard M. Shaw


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