Re: [gentoo-science] Mathematica issue

[Andrew Savchenko]

Hi,

On Thu, 05 Feb 2015 14:40:10 +0100 christoph irrenfried wrote:
> Hello,
> my name is Chris and I have a huge Mathemaica problem. I need it for
> work on a daily bases but after I did my regular update a couple mounths
> ago it just wont start again. I filed this issue on the gentoo forum but
> I cant find a way to get rid of this problem. The error message is as a
> pic included.
> Than a couple weeks ago I bought a laptop and installed gentoo with
> gnome on it but there aswell and I got the same error. I have
> no idea what's the problem. I wanted to ask you if someone has a
> gentoo/gnome system with mathematica running and if so if it is possible
> to get the USE flags from your make.conf or I don't know if there is a
> way to compare my settings with your system and see if maybe (or
> definitely) I messed something up e.g. fonts or something ....

I don't use Mathematica now (maxima and R are sufficient for my
needs), but I can give you a few ideas.

0) I'm not sure USE flags will help you, problem may lie in other
area: missing library, toolkit, util, version mismatch,
misconfigured system and so on.

1) Run Mathematica from console. It may drop to the terminal some
useful messages (errors, warngings, etc) which may give a clue.

2) If any security mechanisms are engaged (e.g. SELinux, PaX,
GrSecurity, Yama framework and so on), please disable all of them
for testing. They may interfere with complex proprietary software
badly.

3) Please be sure, that iptables on your host are not a hinder
(e.g. disable iptables for testing, if in use).

4) Run tcpdump (net-analyzer/tcpdump) to see what Mathematica tries
to do on the net, in particular what ip and port it tries to
access. Verify that they are accessible using netcat or telnet.

5) Try to run Mathematica in terminal in debug mode. Since I don't
have this app right now I can't tell you exactly how to enable it,
but looking for --help output (or in Mathematica docs) may help.
Maybe it supports something like --verbose or --debug, which will
help you to get more information, then in step 1).

6) Inspect Mathematica requirements from its docs, maybe some
package or tool is missed, maybe version is wrong.

7) If anything above fails, there is one more step, an ultimate one.
Run (assuming Mathematica command runs it):

$ strace -ff Mathematica -o mathematica
(install dev-util/strace if you don't have it)

And look through all mathematica.$pid files. They will contain
every system call. You will be able to see what files application
tries to access, what network actions it tries to perform and so
on. The answer will be there, but it will not be very easy to find.

A good start will be to grep trough all file and socket access (or
use -e filter of strace itself). Maybe it tries to load some
library, or to run some tool and fails. Maybe required component is
present on your system, but version is different from what is
needed.

8) As a complementary to strace you may use dev-util/ltrace. ltrace
will print you *each* library call made buy an application. Output
data will be enormous, but will contain a very detail fingerprint
of what application does. With some effort this should help to
understand what is wrong.

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko