Gaim won't load

elias4444 · n00b Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 74

Anyone got any ideas?

I emerged gaim, and it ran fine the first time, but after creating an account and trying to reload it, it just sits there. I can see the process still running in the background with a ps -Al, but I can only kill it and try again. I can get gaim to load if I delete the .gaimrc file in my user directory, but once I set any preferences again, it starts locking up again.

I went and tried emerging the masked 0.63 gaim to see if that would fix the problem...it didn't. I still have the exact same issue.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

ebrostig · Posted: Thu May 22, 2003 6:51 pm Post subject:

I just upgraded from 0.59 to 0.63 and had no problems whatsoever.

Maybe you should try to delete the .gaim directory too?

If this continues to occur, maybe you can trace the running process to see what is going on? To do so, you need strace, 'emerge strace'

Here is how to trace Gaim:

1. Start gaim as normal and wait until it seems to be hanging.
2. Use ps to find the process id of gaim.
3. Trace it with: strace -ff -o gaimtrc -p PID where PID is the process id of gaim
4. Put the file somewhere on the net and post a link here and I'll take a look at it for you.

Erik
_________________
'Yes, Firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'

elias4444 · n00b Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 74

Alright, this is REALLY strange now. I tried your strace idea...and as soon as I run the strace command, the gaim window pops up and everything runs normally. I then tried running gaim again, and it was the same - it waits until I run strace on it, and then it comes up normally. Could it be that the window is "hiding" somewhere perhaps? Behind something? I did try to activate the system tray plugin, although it never seems to remember that I did that. Any other ideas?

elias4444 · n00b Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 74

I also just noticed that when booting gaim the second time (after the .gaimrc file has been created), not only does the window not pop up, but the gaim process stays around 95% resource utilization in KSysGuard.

elias4444 · n00b Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 74

I FOUND IT! Buried deep within the gaim bug reports on sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=235&atid=100235&func=detail&aid=716594

Just need to create a .libao file in my ~ directory and enter the line:
default_driver=arts

Apparently, on some systems, gaim has a hard time figuring out what sound driver to use.

ebrostig · Posted: Thu May 22, 2003 10:22 pm Post subject:

I'm glad you found the solution!

I've been really busy and have not had time to check on the forums in a few hours.

Happy gaim'ing!

Erik
_________________
'Yes, Firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'

djglass · n00b Joined: 10 May 2003 Posts: 2 Location: /dev/null

i was having the exact same problem with getting gaim to run under kde. the fix