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Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] error when running ethereal 0.10.10

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 09:53:44 -0700
William Murphy L (BH/LMI) wrote:

Can I move ld.so.1 to another directory

Not unless you want to make your machine completely unusable.

Ethereal probably picks it up from /usr/lib/ld.so.1, as that's probably what's wired into the binary by the linker.

ld.so.1 is the "run-time linker"; it's the first piece of code run by dynamically-linked programs. (Moving it means that dynamically-linked programs that use the version you moved won't run, which is likely to mean that a lot of programs on your system won't run - and those might be programs that *HAVE* to run in order for your system to be able to start up.) When the program starts, it attempts to find all the shared libraries used by a program and map them into the address space of the process running the program.

The error message in question is coming *from* the run-time linker; the problem isn't that the system can't find the run-time linker, the problem is that the run-time linker can't find the libXext.so.0 dynamically-linked library.

Do you have a libXext.so.0 file somewhere on your system? If not, have you installed X11 on your system? If not, you need to install it. (Yes, even if the machine on which you're trying to run Ethereal has no display. In that case, you don't need to install an X server, but you *do* need the X client libraries, including the libXext library.)