Technical Support Information
Last update: 29 February 2008

Solving GV4 Shared Library Problems

Problem: GV4 fails to start, giving an error like:

error while loading shared libraries ... 
cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied.

This is caused by the settings of the SELinux security facility, which is enabled by default in many recent Linux versions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Solution: Run the following command as root to resolve this issue:

# chcon -t texrel_shlib_t /path/gv/lib/* /path/gv/lib/MESAGL/* 

Problem: GV4 fails to start. It says it is looking for libstdc++.so.5 and can't find it.

Solution: This type of error usually means that GV4 needs an older version of a library than the one installed by default with the operating system. In this case, version 6 of the standard C++ library is what the system provides by default. The solution is to install the compatibility package containing the older library version that is typically included on the installation media.

The specific error above occurs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 systems running the 64-bit version of the operating system where you are trying to run the 32-bit version of GV4: typically, on AMD-64 systems. In such cases, the 64-bit version of the older library is installed (in /usr/lib64), but the 32-bit version is not.

The relevant package's name begins with “compat-libstdc++-33” and concludes with some minor version numbers. Once installed, the error is resolved.

You can install this package using the standard package installation tools for your Linux distribution, or you can install it manually using a command like the following:

# rpm -i /path-to-media/path-to-RPMs/compab-libstdc++-33*.rpm 

For example, on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system, the command is:

# rpm -i /media/cdrom/Client/compat-libstdc++-33*.rpm

The required RPM was on the 4th CD in the set. I located it by mounting each CD in turn and looking in the Client subdirectory in order to find it.