audacity emerges fine, but doesn't start

koslowj · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Feb 2005 Posts: 100

After a recent re-install I now emerged audacity, apparently without problems. The binary is there, the man-pages as well,
but I cannot start the program. Not even "audacity -help" or "audacity -version" does anything. ps doesn't show a running audacity either.
I don't see any error messages as well. Eix produces

lekto · Posted: Tue Aug 13, 2024 6:34 pm Post subject:

Try running audacity with strace (dev-debug/strace) and look for errors; also check with ldd if some shared objects are missing.

koslowj · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Feb 2005 Posts: 100

I see no problem with the linked libraries. Strace, on the other hand, does show an error (of course), see
https://pastebin.com/p0Hjy9ia
Beware, the file is 1659 lines long :-(

koslowj · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Feb 2005 Posts: 100

Well, the problem has nothing to do with audacity, after all. When other programs started behaving strangely, I resorted to the old Microsoft trick and restarted. Afterwards, audacity started fine.
Not sure yet, what caused this strange behavior.

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 22619

The strace output has its strings truncated, but this looks to me like the problem that comes up periodically where a machine's hostname changes, and that prevents newly started programs from using old Xauthority data. Now that it works, note the current output of hostname (whether or not you tell it to us). If this fails again, check the value of hostname after it fails. If I am right, you will find that the two values differ. The next step is to find why your hostname is changing, since that should not happen with any regularity on a desktop system.