Points of Interest

Penguin (openclipart.org, public domain)

I’m using Linux for more than 10 years now, and it is my operating system of choice. There is plenty of cool software available, and any programming environment is right at my finger tips. Even on “The Desktop”, it is often much easier and more convenient to use than any other operating system.

However, there are still a lot of glitches which are capable of rendering the machine useless for average users.

Today, I “just” wanted to record some audio snippets from my synthesizers via firewire. Not a problem, everything is set up since I got the device, and even jackd, the realtime audio server, starts automatically as soon as I log in.

OK, I want to record some audio. No problem. First start qjackctl, the graphical frontend for jackd. So I did. But it told me that jackd is not running. No problem, I just tried to start it from qjackctl’s interface. Doh. A problem occured. jackd cannot find libraw1394.so.8. Phew. WTF?!?

I remember what I did wrong. A couple of days back I was notified about an update to Kubuntu 9.10. As some software didn’t work (e.g. ll-scope, an oscilloscope I wanted to use for some postings about synth programming) I installed the update in the hope to get some issues fixed. Seems it was a catch-22 situation. For the average user, this was a showstopper. For an experienced Linux user, it’s an issue of a couple of seconds. Hah, aren’t we great hackers? No, we aren’t. Otherwise we had written more robust software. But anyway, here’s how to fix the issue:

• Open a terminal window.
• Gain root access by typing su.
• Invoke find / -name libraw1394* to determine whether and which version of the firewire library is installed. find will tell you that some are available in /usr/lib. Change to this directory by typing cd /usr/lib.
• List all firewire libraries by typing ls -la libraw1394*. Note the lines starting with a dash rather with an l.
• Create a symbolic link called libraw1394.so.8 which points to the actual library to please jackd. The command should look like ln -s libraw1394.so.11.0.1 libraw1394.so.8.
• Type exit to return to normal user mode.
• Try to start jackd. It should now start without any error.

Simple, wasn’t it? Surely I will be able to record some audio in a couple of seconds. Really? Let’s see…

[¹] According to echo $RANDOM

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 0:44 and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.