oolite 1.9.1.* will not start on Ubuntu 23.10

[jpwgarrison]

I've seen this on a few clients, new installs and upgrades:

The Release Oolite 1.90 works as expected.

The pre-release installers - e.g https://github.com/OoliteProject/oolite/releases/tag/1.91.0.7572-231209-a8da8cf fail to start:

./oolite.app/oolite: error while loading shared libraries: libgnustep-base.so.1.28: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Full compile from source fails a bit later:

./oolite.app/oolite: symbol lookup error: /lib/libgnustep-base.so.1.29: undefined symbol: gnutls_x509_crt_get_issuer_dn3, version GNUTLS_3_4

Let me know if I missed something obvious.

$ uname -a
Linux dell-sff-proto-00 6.5.0-14-generic #14-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue Nov 14 14:59:49 UTC 2023 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 23.10
Release:	23.10
Codename:	mantic

[HiranChaudhuri]

Looks like Ubuntu Mantic comes with libgnustep 1.29 - therefore the dependency cannot be resolved.
And as you show it, with that one does not compile cleanly.

https://packages.ubuntu.com/mantic/allpackages

[OoMrFlibble]

Same on LinuxMint 22 beta (based on Ubuntu 24.04), libgnustep-base1.29 is available, but not the 1.28.

Checking, I see that the errant library is "almost" bundled...

~/GNUstep/Applications/Oolite/oolite-deps/lib/libgnustep-base.so.1.20

I pushed a copy of libgnustep-base-so.1.28 across from a working LinuxMint 21.3 setup, to replace the 1.20.

The subsequently discovered chain of libraries required by Oolite was this:

libobjc.so.2
libicui18n.so.70
llibicuuc.so.70
libicudata.so.70

I copied all those libraries across, then, Oolite 1.91 current was running, with this console ouput:-

Unable to create time zone for name: 'Europe/London'
(source '(null)').

You can override the timezone name by setting the 'Local Time Zone'
NSUserDefault via the 'defaults' command line utility, a Preferences
application, or some other utility.
eg "defaults write NSGlobalDomain 'Local Time Zone' 'Africa/Nairobi'"
See '(null)'
for the standard timezones such as 'GB-Eire' or 'America/Chicago'.
AL lib: (WW) alc_initconfig: Failed to initialize backend "pulse"
MESA: error: ZINK: failed to choose pdev
glx: failed to create drisw screen
AL lib: (WW) FreeDevice: (0x59d118402d00) Deleting 2 Buffer(s)

The GL errors are expected, as this is on a qemu/kvm VM over spice. The timezone stuff, perhaps due to missing GNUstep support files, and the pulse issue is I think covered in a different ticket. Nothing sticks out in the Latest.log. I did not pursue audio at this point. I'll do that when I install Mint 22 to real metal.

Might it be that the bundled libraries had been sufficient for 1.90 to work on new systems, but got forgotten in the transition to 1.91, which would work on 'current' distros similar to that on which it was built? A refresh of bundled library versions in the appimage/installer may prevent problems for older, newer, or weirder distros.

Distro version specific packages (deb/rpm/apk etc.) avoid such dependency bloat, so are potentially less resource hungry, though of course that's a whole other world of pain.