Trouble starting gdm gnome session; issue with gdbm package?

General Discussion
1

Hi. I want to report/discuss an issue I have. I am running system version 31440 and was having trouble starting gdm (black screen and/or “something is wrong” GUI message appearing).

I found many errors in my systemd logs that look like this:

Oct 30 08:42:37 clr-ac6c3d18a1e44dd9af337de503fff7df gsd-sound[6328]: /usr/libexec/gsd-sound: error while loading shared libraries: libgdbm.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The “evil fix” to make my system “work” again was to create the following symlink.

/lib64/libgdbm.so.4 -> /lib64/libgdbm.so.6.0.0

Running “swupd diagnose” does not show any issues with this file being missing.

Can anyone offer some clues on what went wrong here? And/or what is the “correct” fix here? It would appear as though an update removed the older libgdbm even though various things still rely on it. One of those things was pulseaudio, which I think is a dependency for starting a gnome session from gdm.

2

Bug, I broke it. I’ll try and get a fix in asap. :slight_smile:

3

Weird, I can’t reproduce:

$ ldd gsd-sound |grep gdbm
	libgdbm.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libgdbm.so.6 (0x00007fa1b1a1e000)

Can you sudo swupd repair ? I’m on 31440 just like you!

4

It would seem that your gsd-sound was linked differently than mine…

root@clr-ac6c3d18a1e44dd9af337de503fff7df/home/x # ldd /usr/libexec/gsd-sound | grep gdbm
libgdbm.so.4 => /usr/lib64/libgdbm.so.4 (0x00007ff6febce000)

Also with pulseaudio:

x@clr-ac6c3d18a1e44dd9af337de503fff7df~ $ which pulseaudio 
/usr/bin/haswell/pulseaudio
x@clr-ac6c3d18a1e44dd9af337de503fff7df~ $ ldd /usr/bin/haswell/pulseaudio | grep gdbm
libgdbm.so.4 => /usr/lib64/libgdbm.so.4 (0x00007f8631b5d000)
5

Also, I did do an ‘swupd repair’ and it removed the link I added:

root@clr-ac6c3d18a1e44dd9af337de503fff7df/home/x # ldd /usr/libexec/gsd-sound | grep gdbm
libgdbm.so.4 => not found

I just added the link back by hand since my system will not work without this “hack”.