Re: [gdm-list] gdm doesn't use /etc/ld.so.conf libraries.

[Patrick Scheibe <pscheibe trm uni-leipzig de>]

Thanks for your reply and sorry for forgetting the basics:
I'm running

GDM 2.20.7
Gnome Version 2.22.3
under Ubuntu 8.04 (x86_64)

This is afaik the latest Ubuntu available
but I remember having the same problem under my last Ubuntu 7.xx.

To be clear: I can set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable in my Gnome
environment. This works perfectly.

But actually I used to made the libs needed by my program visible with
the ldconfig tool. ldconfig seems to store all found libs in the binary
file /etc/ls.so.cache. As far as I can tell this is one way to make
libraries available to programs and this way is used by the ubuntu
installer very often. Another way is to set the environment variable
LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

What I don't want is that I have to do it both ways. Since I normally
don't come in touch with such details of my Gnome desktop I was
wondering whether I just miss some things.
So Question is: after adding places to /etc/ld.so.conf and running
ldconfig, why doesn't see programs started with a Gnome starter the
libs?

Thanks in advance for any hint.

Cheers
Patrick

PS: With "Gnome starter" I mean adding a "custom application launcher"
to the panel which starts the binary of mathematica.


On Fri, 2008-09-26 at 10:05 -0400, Ray Strode wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > I use Mathematica together with my image-processing library what means
> > that I call
> > functions of this lib out of the Mathematica frontend. The library
> > itself depends on several libs (some of them in my home/lib) which are
> > either known by the system or which were made visible with
> > the /etc/ld.so.conf and the ldconfig tool.
> > When I start Mathematica from a console everything works fine (notice: I
> > have not set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable). Starting Mathematica by an
> > gdm-application launcher and my image-tools don't work. One solution is
> > to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH in my or in the system-wide .profile file
> > which is read by gdm.
> What do you mean by gdm-application launcher?  Do you mean a GNOME
> panel launcher?
> 
> > Is there a reason why gdm doesn't use the ldconfig settings?
> 
> You're probably seeing a bug similar to this old issue:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=164869
> 
> What distro are you running?
> 
> When you log in on some distros gdm ends up running something like:
> 
> exec $SSH_AGENT /bin/sh -c "exec -l $SHELL -c \"$1\""
> 
> where $SSH_AGENT is /usr/bin/ssh-agent $SHELL is usually /bin/bash and
> $1 is usually gnome-session
> 
> The problem is /usr/bin/ssh-agent is setgid for security reasons which
> means libc will strip out any variables starting with LD_ before
> running it (LD_ variables have the ability to alter how the program
> would execute)
> 
> The solution is to fix the Xsession file to invoke ssh-agent using
> it's alternate syntax
> 
> eval `ssh-agent -s`
> 
> first and then changing the exec line to just be
> 
> exec -l $SHELL -c \"$1\"
> 
> Alternatively you could throw the LD_ variables over the ssh-agent
> wall with env, like:
> 
> exec $SSH_AGENT /usr/bin/env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH /bin/sh
> -c "exec -l $SHELL -c \"$1\""
> 
> Anyway, if this is the problem you're seeing, then you should file
> this issue with your distro (or upgrade your distro if it's old and
> might already be fixed)
> 
> --Ray
>