Solutions to errors

Most of time I waste while programming is taken up by searching for the reason an error message appears and how to fix it. This page present the error codes I’ve come across and how I solved the problem. You’d be surprised how often a embarrassingly simple problem in retrospect causes a big hold-up, especially when you are in a hurry.

Building errors

These are usually caused by a missing package, but it can be such a pain to find the package to actually need. These packages are from Synaptic, you many need differently named ones on other distros.

Error: Error: possibly undefined macro: AC_DISABLE_STATIC
Problem: You need the libtools package to build this software. This is simply libtools in Synaptic.

Error: Error:X11/Intrinsic.h：No such file or directory
Problem: You need libext-dev

Python

LXML

Error: SyntaxError: cannot use absolute path on element
Problem: I was trying to do:
root = doc.getroot()
tags = root.findall("//tagname")
Solution: You need to use the XML document directly to use an absolute path:
tags = doc.findall("//g")

Exaile

Error: Playback error encountered! Configured audiosink bin1 is not working (or bin0)
Problem: Exaile cannot find an audio sink to connect to with GStreamer. You need to install one that matches your audio sink, such as ALSA or PulseAudio.
Solution: Install the relevant package and restart Exaile. For Ubuntu, this is gstreamer0.10-alsa, gstreamer0.10-esd, gstreamer0.10-puseaudio or similar. According to this, on Arch Linux this may also be caused by a Flash object fighting for ALSA.

Glade

Error: The following required catalogues are unavailable: gnome
Solution: you need the glade-gnome package.