cadabra2-gtk not working in Linux Mint installation

Question

Hi,

I'm eager to try out Cadabra but having some trouble getting it fully working on Linux Mint. I started out with Mint 17.3 and tried using the Mint 18 .deb, which obviously didn't work. So instead I built it from the source and instructions on github. This partially worked in that I could use Cadabra from the terminal, but cadabra2-gtk did not work. My next step was to upgrade to Mint 18.1. The build was still there but still had the same problem - it works from the terminal but not from the menu or by calling cadabra2-gtk. I tried reinstalling from the Mint 18 .deb but still have the same issue. When I call cadabra2-gtk I get the following output:

cadabra-client: spawning server cadabra2-gtk: symbol lookup error: /usr/local/lib/libcadabra_client.so: undefined symbol: _ZN4Glib22spawn_async_with_pipesERKSsRKNS_11ArrayHandleISsNS17Container Helpers10TypeTraitsISsEEEES8_NS10SpawnFlagsERKN4sigc4slotIvNSA 3nilESC_SC_SC_SC_SC_SC_EEPiSG_SG_SG

I have no idea what this means! Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers, Robert

Answer 1

You now have a mixed system with some stuff installed by yourself and some by the .deb. That's a recipe for problems. The best is to first remove what you installed by hand. If you still have the build directory, you can do

sudo make uninstall

from there. If not, you can get rid of the things that are causing problems by doing

sudo rm -f /usr/local/lib/libcadabra*

instead.

Then try if the .deb version now works.

Comments

Hi Kasper,

I tried doing a complete uninstall/reinstall. I uninstalled both Cadabra and Cadabra2 and manually purged any libraries, configuration files, and other files and directories I could find related to either Cadabra or Cadabra2.
Now that Cadabra2 is in the Mint repository, I think I eventually installed it from there.

I can open cadabra2-gtk and at first sight it appears to work, but any line terminated with a ; causes it to crash with the following error:

"symbol lookup error: cadabra2-gtk: undefined symbol: _ZN13exec_stream_t5startERKNSt7__cxx1112basic_stringIcSt11char_traitsIcESaIcEEES7_"

For example, if I input just the line

{a,b}::Indices(position=fixed).

it executes without a problem, but if I input

{a,b}::Indices(position=fixed);

it crashes with the above error. Likewise if I enter

{a,b}::Indices(position=fixed).
A_{a}^{b};

it again crashes with the same error. If I do the same thing in a terminal I get the following error

 File "<console>", line 1
   A_{a}^{b};
     ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Maybe I should try the complete uninstall/reinstall again, but I'm beginning to worry that I'm messing up my system because I'm starting to get other weird system behaviours, like my camera randomly crashes during Skype calls.

---

Can you run

ldd `which cadabra2-gtk`

and send me the output (to info@cadabra.science please).