help needed: oolite 1.71.2 only runs as root

joepie · Post by **joepie** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 9:00 pm

Hi all,

I'm a Oolite newbie, just found it on the net a couple of days ago. Wow, what a nice way to relive the old days. I played Elite on four platforms at least. Oolite is of course the most beautiful incarnation of them all.

So have been playing Oolite 1.71.2 on opensuse 11, but yesterday I mistakingly ran it as root. Of course the game started, but after a reboot, I can't seem to run it as user anymore. The game halts saying:

2008-07-31 22:34:48.444 oolite[26708] [startup.exception]: ***** Unhandled exception during startup: NSInvalidArgumentException (Unexpected cross reference in property list).

Erk. It looks like Oolite died with an error. When making an error
report, please copy + paste the log above into the report.

But it still runs under the root account.

How can I get it to run under my user account again, please help!!

joepie

edit: I didn't mention that I deleted, reinstalled and ran the nightly build, deleted all the oxp's and it is still the same.

lucabu · Post by **lucabu** » Fri Aug 01, 2008 8:35 am

Hello.

Maybe running an instance of the game as root caused the process to change ownership to some file.

Try a find in your home directory to see if you can figure out where it is.

joepie · Post by **joepie** » Sat Aug 02, 2008 2:48 am

Hi lucabu,

Thanks for your input. Unfortunately there is no Oolite related file owned by root in my home directory. I scanned with find ~/ -user root -print, but no Oolite related files show up (Trashcan does, but that one doesn't count).

Today I grew impatient and completely reinstalled suse 11, just to make sure, but even that didn't help. It really must be something in my user account that changed and kills Oolite.

The strangest part is that I can reinstall 1.65, which runs. But my 1.71.2 based saves don't work well with that version: I get some error messages when loading Realistic Shipyards 3.02 && my current ship is gone ;(.

Any more suggestions that I could try?
Thanks,

joepie

Post by **Cmdr James** » Sat Aug 02, 2008 7:13 am

I think you have some files in an OXP that are not readble by you, but are by root. They dont have to be owned by root (maybe the permissions are by group or something) so it is possible your find would not have found all the possibilities.

Do you have any OXPs installed, and if so, could you either try removing them, or inspect the file permissions?

joepie · Post by **joepie** » Sat Aug 02, 2008 5:32 pm

Hi Cmdr James,

I have deleted all oxp's and renamed the savegames (extensions), and reinstalled the OS on a formatted partition this time around

.

I guess it must be in the program package or indeed something to do with permissions.
To check this, I made a dummy account, and logged in. The game runs under the test account.
But not under my own account

.

I'm really at a loss here. Bugger. Bought myself a nice new joystick too...
Maybe I'll revert to suse 10.3, to see what will happen. Or can someone help me with a script to ferret out the permissions? This is a bit beyond my league...

joepie

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Sat Aug 02, 2008 8:46 pm

I believe Oolite’s cache file is corrupt. (The actual error is caused by a bug GNUstep’s property list parser – it’s not supposed to throw exceptions for bad data – and the only property list that should have cross references in it is the cache.) Try deleting ~/GNUstep/Library/Caches/Oolite-cache.plist.

I’ve added code to catch this in future.

joepie · Post by **joepie** » Sat Aug 02, 2008 10:03 pm

Supreme High Cmdr Ahruman

,

That did the trick. I'm up and running again.
A particularly nasty bug that was, it kills the mouse too, so I had to end my KDE session with the keyboard. The resetting is not so much of a problem, but its just more difficult to find out what's wrong if you can only use the current terminal screen

But that's soon to be forgot, I'm off to blast me some pirates.

Thanks a million,

joepie

davcefai · Post by **davcefai** » Mon Aug 11, 2008 6:55 pm

Joepie, one tip:

You never ever ever reinstall Linux! There's enough info in the log files to ultimately track down any problem.

You got excellent advice here. For non Oolite problems go to www.linuxquestions.org. (Not that you can't ask about Oolite there anyway). The speed of response is usually frightening.

joepie · Post by **joepie** » Wed Aug 27, 2008 7:31 pm

davcefai wrote:
Joepie, one tip:

You never ever ever reinstall Linux! There's enough info in the log files to ultimately track down any problem.

You got excellent advice here. For non Oolite problems go to www.linuxquestions.org. (Not that you can't ask about Oolite there anyway). The speed of response is usually frightening.

Highcommander davcefai,

I know you're right, reinstalling is like throwing in the towel. I did that more often when I was still running windows. At least you get to keep your files with Linux

.

Actually, I don't reinstall linux often. This being a case of the Oolite bug that kept me from playing, but also an unstable Opensuse 11.0 that was out only a week or two at the time. For some reason way beyond me, the root password wasn't accepted anymore in KDE/yast, whilst with su it still worked (in a terminal).

And I have to admit to be only halfway semi-proficient with Linux. Having used it for 5 years, and stopped about 10 years ago after switching jobs. Linux I believe had just outgrown the floppy disto by then. When I went to Linux only two years ago, too many things changed, and I had to relearn a couple of things. I can still work my way around in vi though

.

Your advice is very sound and you can trust it to be taken as such.

Thanks,

Joepie.

joepie · Post by **joepie** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 3:38 am

joepie wrote:
davcefai wrote:
Joepie, one tip:

You never ever ever reinstall Linux! There's enough info in the log files to ultimately track down any problem.

You got excellent advice here. For non Oolite problems go to www.linuxquestions.org. (Not that you can't ask about Oolite there anyway). The speed of response is usually frightening.
Highcommander davcefai,

I know you're right, reinstalling is like throwing in the towel. I did that more often when I was still running windows. At least, you get to keep your personal files with Linux .

Actually, I don't reinstall linux often. In this I decided to go for it as I hoped it would rid me of the bug that kept me from playing, but also an unstable Opensuse 11.0 that was out only a week or two at the time. For some reason way beyond me, the root password wasn't accepted anymore in KDE/yast, whilst with su it still worked (in a terminal).

Also, I have to admit to be only halfway semi-proficient with Linux. Having used it for 5 years at work, and stopped about 10 years ago after switching jobs. Linux I believe had just outgrown the floppy disto by then. When I went to Linux on my home pc only two years ago, so many things had changed, and I had to relearn a couple of things. I can still work my way around in vi though .

Your advice is very sound and you can trust it to be taken as such.

Thanks,

Joepie.

davcefai · Post by **davcefai** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 3:56 am

Read up on this before you try it.

If you delete the file /etc/shadow, that wipes out all your passwords and you can start again.