Xara LX won't launch in 13.10

Solution 1:

Getting xaralx to run

The workaround for this problem is to rebuild the package. But don't worry! This is very easy to do with apt-build.

apt-build will automatically download the source, resolve the dependencies, build the debian package, and then install the package. The package can then also be removed through apt-get as normal.

apt-build is not installed by default:

sudo apt-get install apt-build

The installation will present a few configuration options; accepting the defaults is fine. (For more information on the configuration, see this answer on building from source.)

Then:

sudo apt-build install xaralx

This process will take some time depending on your computer. On my Asus X201E (Celeron 847, 1.10 GHz, 4 GB ram) it took about 30 minutes.

The process will also rebuild some dependent packages: xaralx-svg, xaralx-examples, and libxar-dev, so follow this with:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

The examples are not installed by default, so you may also want:

sudo apt-get install xaralx-examples

That's it! xaralx can now be launched normally and will start without an error.

Note: If you are on a 64-bit installation, you may see get this error message after apt-get update:

W: Failed to fetch file:/var/cache/apt-build/repository/dists/apt-build/main/binary-i386/Packages  File not found

This is harmless, but you can get rid of it by editing the apt-build source list. (See this answer, but please note that you only need to change apt-build.list. No changes are needed in the standard sources.list).

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/apt-build.list

Change

deb file:/var/cache/apt-build/repository apt-build main

to:

deb [arch=amd64] file:/var/cache/apt-build/repository apt-build main

Background information

This problem is the result of a bug that had been in a previous version of libwxgtk2.8-xx.

This affected all packages using wxWidgets that had been compiled against any version of libwxgtk prior to 2.8.10.1-0ubuntu1.

Most packages have since been fixed, but some older packages that have not have not had much recent development work, such as xaralx, may still have the problem.

The solution is to rebuild the package with updated dependencies.

This was reported against xaralx and the problem has been fixed upstream in the Debian package. For some reason, however, the Ubuntu package will still install a binary that has not been fixed and will not run.