Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Day: November 13, 2011

Multilib version of Slackware’s “11-11-11” glibc

November 13, 2011 / / 14 Comments

 The glibc packages in Slackware -current were updated to 2.14.1 a few days ago. Unfortunately, a couple of issues were reported, you will find them in this LinuxQuestions thread.

Since I had to compile my multilib version of glibc still, I decided to wait a bit with releasing them, and that allowed me to find and apply the patch reported in the above thread that seems to solve the issues. The patch comes from Linux From Scratch and appears to be upstream fixes that are going to be in the next release of glibc. I upgraded my laptop with this new multilib glibc package, and can confirm that applications like firefox, libreoffice, calibre, mplayer run without any issues here.

I know that several people have mentioned this patch to Pat Volkerding already, and if the patch gets applied to Slackware’s glibc package I will simply rename my own multilib versions from “1alien” to “2alien” in order to stay in sync with the versioning of the originals.

Along with the updated mulitilib glibc packages, I also uploaded a new version of the “compat32-tools” package to the “current” section, containing a bug-fixed convertpkg-compat32 script. I also refreshed the “slackware64-compat32” subdirectory which contains the packages converted by the “massconvert32.sh” script.

Eric

kmail terminates during startup with “Failed to fetch the resource collection”

November 13, 2011 / / 11 Comments

One thing that keeps boggling people’s minds when they use KDE is Akonadi, the framework used to access PIM-like data. PIM being “Personal Information Management”. Akonadi leaves me in the dark too, sometimes!

If you want to know a bit more about how Akonadi sits at the core of your personal data management in KDE, you might want to read these articles first, one being two  years old and the other a bit more recent… http://thomasmcguire.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/akonadi-nepomuk-and-strigi-explained/ and http://vizzzion.org/blog/2010/08/demystifying-akonadi/ . This is also a nice article “Akonadi misconception #1: where is my data?“: http://blogs.kde.org/node/4503 which is definitely worth checking out.

In the meantime, there is an issue I wanted to discuss with you, considering Akonadi. When you upgrade to KDE 4.7.x coming from Slackware’s KDE 4.5.5, the upgrade process is not always smooth. The PIM suite in KDE 4.7.x is now using Akonadi as its backend, meaning your PIM data (kmail, kontact etc) are migrated over to the Akonadi storage the very first time you start your new KDE. This migration is not always proceeding perfectly.

There’s a thread on LinuxQuestions.org about kmail crashing on startup with a very specific error message “Failed to fetch the resource collection“. I provided the solution in that thread but thought it would be good to document it here in the blog as well. The bug is fairly old, it is being discussed in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259355

What you have to do if you encounter this issue, is the following:

  1. Launch Akonadi Console (for instance by pressing “Alt-F2” to open krunner and typing “akonadiconsole”).
  2. In the “Agents” tab, select the “Local Folders” resource.
  3. Select “Configure > Configure natively…”.
  4. If an error appears indicating that “the current folder does not exist” don’t worry. Select a new directory which does not yet exist, for instance: /home/<USERNAME>/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/

This should fix the issue with kmail.

You can fix it the hard way, by removing all of your “.kde” directory content but that is so rude, and you lose a lot of other configurations besides your mail.

A whole section of the KDE User Base is devoted to Akonadi troubleshooting, I recommend you check that out if you run into Akonadi related issues: http://userbase.kde.org/Akonadi_4.4/Troubleshooting

Cheers, Eric

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