[Rd] R started in terminal shell script or ESS steps on LD_LIBRARY_PATH?

[Marc Schwartz (via MN)]

Hi all,

In follow up to my prior post on this issue, I have found a workaround,
but have not yet clearly identified the etiology of the problem.
Whatever it is, it is presumably unique to my system, though if anyone
can replicate this on another FC4 system...  :-)

The workaround involves booting to init 3 rather than init 5 and
starting X manually from the console. I found this after going through
some of the steps described below regarding my X configuration. In this
way, LD_LIBRARY_PATH is preserved and RODBC works without issue in both
ESS and the gnome-terminal shell start up script.

Dirk was kind enough to send me an offlist e-mail yesterday in reply,
which sparked some thoughts as I was away from the computer for a few
hours yesterday afternoon and evening.

Dirk's e-mail logically queried on any issues with gnome-terminal and/or
the bash shell itself.

Since this problem was new (this had all worked previously), I checked
to see if there had been any recent updates to either gnome-terminal or
bash in the FC repos. There were none, although there have been of
course updates to GNOME, GTK and other libs.

This got me to think about other updates since the last known time this
process worked properly. So I spent several hours last night and this
morning reviewing possibilities.

The last Xorg updates are from last September, so these are not new.

Other changes that I had made in the recent past include:

1. Modifying my xorg.conf to support nVidia TwinView hardware
acceleration functionality. TwinView is like xinerama mode, spanning
both displays to give me a virtual 3200x1200 screen, though supporting
HW acceleration on both displays. Previously I had been using two X
servers (also using the nVidia driver in non-xinerama mode) to support
my dual display configuration.  Reverting back to the old configuration
did not resolve the problem. 

2. The last nVidia driver update (8178) was in December and this process
had worked since then.

3. There was an updated Cisco VPN client for Linux (4.8) to support
recent kernels. The VPN client is installed from source. This normally
starts up on boot as a service. Disabling the service, thus removing the
kernel module, did not resolve the problem.

4. I had updated the encryption of several of my partitions on my laptop
to use dm-crypt/LUKS with 256 bit AES from regular dm-crypt to take
advantage of pending LUKS support updates in HAL and other system
functions. Disabling the encryption (so the relevant kernel modules did
not load), logging in as root and running ESS from root's home did not
resolve the problem.

5. Just in case, I also reinstalled kernel version 2.6.15-1.1830
(running 1833 now) to see if there was any change there. No joy. I
cannot locate any of the 2.6.14 FC4 kernel versions, as these have been
removed from the repos, so it leaves open the possibility of something
in the .14 to .15 rebase change.


Other than routine system updates via yum, these are the only
"self-inflicted" changes that I have made recently. If any of the above
should spark some thoughts, let me know.

My plans are to live with this for now. FC5 is targeted for release next
Wednesday, presuming that it stays on schedule. I'll do a clean install
with that and see if anything is resolved, perhaps indicating some other
issue that is as yet unidentified.

Many thanks to Dirk for your assistance.

Best regards,

Marc Schwartz