[SOLVED] Help! My gconf2 broke and that in turn broke my apt. :(

[GabiAPF]

Hello. I am using Debian Squeeze.

I was dealing with the dependency hell required to compile the latest version of Pidgin, and I tried the following:

apt-get build-dep pidgin

That appeared to work... but I still couldn't configure the new version because it couldn't find my installation of libxss-dev for some unknown reason. But that's not the worst problem: I tried to open my old Pidgin, the one which came with my Squeeze distro, and I couldn't! I got the following error:

gconftool-2: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgconf-2.so.4: undefined symbol: g_dgettext

I tried to reinstall the pidgin package, and got that same error again.

And now, whenever I try to use aptitude/apt-get, I get that same error. Even if what I try to do is reinstall gconf2, I can't because of that error.

Setting up gconf2 (2.28.1-6) ...
gconftool-2: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgconf-2.so.4: undefined symbol: g_dgettext
dpkg: error processing gconf2 (--configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 127
configured to not write apport reports
Errors were encountered while processing:
gconf2
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
A package failed to install. Trying to recover:
Setting up gconf2 (2.28.1-6) ...
gconftool-2: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgconf-2.so.4: undefined symbol: g_dgettext
dpkg: error processing gconf2 (--configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 127
Errors were encountered while processing:
gconf2

I see that there is a symbol collision:

> nm -D /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so | grep g_dgettext
0005bad0 T g_dgettext

> nm -D /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so | grep g_dgettext
U g_dgettext

But I'm afraid I don't know what to do about it.

Is there any way I can fix this?

Thanks in advance.

[GabiAPF]

The apt problem is now solved. It turns out I had an old installation of glib lying about in /usr/local/lib and conflicting with the one in /usr/lib.

If you have read this, thanks for your time. And maybe this will help someone else in the future, if anyone ends up having the same problem.

I still can't install the new version of Pidgin, but at least I got the old one back. :\

[jayd512]

Hi, Gabi.

Thanks for posting your solution.
I'm sure it will help others!