Chapter 11. Installation Troubleshooting

11.1. No eCosPro menu group

Occasionally the eCosPro Menu Group or menu items will not display immediately after installation on Linux Hosts. Normally logging out and back in or restarting the X session resolves this issue. In some instances, a refresh of the menu cache may also be necessary. For example:

Figure 11.1. Ubuntu Gnome Menu Cache Refresh

test@ubuntu:~ > sh -c "/usr/share/gnome-menus/update-gnome-menus-cache \
  /usr/share/applications/ > /usr/share/applications/desktop.${LANG}.cache && \
  killall gnome-panel"

The eCosPro installer uses XdgUtils to make every effort to install the menu group and associated menu items. Unfortunately, some Linux distributions do not follow open standards, creating their own unique way of providing menus. Regrettably in such instances the eCosPro Menu group and items will not be automatically created. The user must either create the menu items themselves, referring to the documentation specific to their Linux distribution, or they may simply ignore the lack of menus and start the eCosPro tools by hand, referring to the eCosPro User Manual and eCosPro Eclipse manuals.

11.2. Application fail to start

11.2.1. Missing shared libraries (Linux only)

The symptom of this issue is applications failing to start when run from either the command line or when selected from the menu.

Certain eCosPro Host Tools require the use of shared libraries which if not installed will result in the failure of the tool to start. The eCosPro installer attempts to determine missing dependencies and report these during the installation. This warning may have been overlooked or forgotten.

As an aid to determine if there are shared libraries required but not installed, the script test-shlib.sh exists in the bin sub-directory of the eCosPro Host Tools and may be passed the name of an executable to test. It will report any missing shared libaries. For example:

$ cd /opt/ecospro/ecoshosttools-4.0.2.1/bin/
$ ./test-shlib.sh configtool
The following shared libraries are not installed but are required in order to run configtool:
libpng12.so.0
$

No output is produced if all required shared libraries are installed.

To install libpng12.so.0, here are some examples for various distributions:

$ sudo zypper install libpng12-0       # openSUSE 
$ sudo apt-get install libpng12-0      # Ubuntu
$ sudo yum install libpng12            # Fedora

Alternatively, simply executing the command from a command line will often gives you an error of which shared libraries are missing:

$ cd /opt/ecospro/ecoshosttools-4.0.2.1/bin/
$ ./configtool
configtool: error while loading shared libraries: libpng12.so.0: cannot open shared object file: \
            No such file or directory

11.2.2. Eclipse or Help fail to start

Eclipse and the Eclipse help system require at least 1GB of memory in order to run. If your workstation or host environment do not have at least 1GB of available memory, when Eclipse or Help is run java will exit with an error. When run from either the command line or from a menu item, the host environment will report the error, otherwise if Help is run from within the GUI configuration tool, it will fail silently.

The solution is to either add additional memory to the host platform or to exit running applications to free memory.