Yogesh Ashok Powar

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    • FrankenDebian

    Dont make a FrankenDebian

    Tags: debian gnu linux

    Recently came to know about a project called as Prav who are building a messaging app without a vendor lock-in. Think of this as ethical in-place replacement for whatsapp. What was more exciting about this project is the group involved in building it by registering a Multi State Cooperative Society in India. Please support this project by becoming a member.

    1. Prav is fork of Quicksy
    2. Quicksy is a fork of Conversations
    3. Conversation is based on Jabber/XMPP protocol
    4. XMPP is open protocol for instant messaging and much more. XMPP address has format username@servername/resource. This allows user to communicate without sticking to same server/domain.

    There are many xmpp servers with open registration, where people can register. e.g., yap@disroot.org is my xmpp id created on disroot.org.

    Anyways, this blog is about how I broke my stable Debian and how I fixed it.

    There is dino-im Debian package for XMPP client for desktop and I installed it and used it for a while to find newer features like emojis or smileys or quotes are present in the newer version of dino-im. So I thought of installing just the dino-im from the testing release, Bookworm.

    And my browsers stopped working.

    Uninstalling dino-im didn’t work. And this state of Debian is called as FrankenDebian. In fact https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian lists it at first place as an advice for Debian users on not breaking the system.

    The following are the sequence of events that led to me fixing it.

    1. Upgraded my current stable to latest stable (Bullseye)
    2. Reinstalled the browsers (Brave, Firefox and Chromium) and none of them worked.
    3. Konqueror browser came for rescue
    4. Dist-upgraded stable to testing. Bullseye to Bookworm. But even that didn’t fix the browser problem.
    5. Installed a fresh Bookworm on a fresh small partition of 8 GB and chroot to it.
    6. Studied the libraries used on dist-upgraded and newly installed Debian
      • dist-upgraded 
        $ ldd /usr/bin/firefox-esr
 linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007fff2d9cc000)
 /usr/local/lib/AppProtection/libAppProtection.so (0x00007f7fcca00000)
 libstdc++.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00007f7fcc600000)
 libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f7fccc49000)
 libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f7fcc81f000)
 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f7fccd25000)
 libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007f7fccc44000)
 libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f7fccc3d000)
 libX11.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6 (0x00007f7fcc4be000)
 libxcb.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1 (0x00007f7fcc494000)
 libXi.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXi.so.6 (0x00007f7fcc480000)
 libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007f7fcc3a1000)
 libXau.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXau.so.6 (0x00007f7fccc36000)
 libXdmcp.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXdmcp.so.6 (0x00007f7fcc000000)
 libXext.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXext.so.6 (0x00007f7fcc38c000)
 libbsd.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbsd.so.0 (0x00007f7fcc376000)
 libmd.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmd.so.0 (0x00007f7fcc369000)
      • New installed one 
        # ldd /usr/bin/firefox-esr
 linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffda11c2000)
 libstdc++.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00007f3bfc000000)
 libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f3bfbfe0000)
 libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f3bfbdff000)
 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f3bfc2d8000)
 libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007f3bfbd20000)
    7. Searched about the first mismatched library which has come from Citrix Workplace
    8. Uninstalling Citrix solved the browser problem.

    Key take aways from this incident are

    1. Must read Dont Break Debian
    2. We often back the user data and ignore the OS data thinking new installation would be easy. But configuring the OS is equally hard as it current OS is evolved as per the needs from the past. So keep backup of OS.

    Good to be on the next-stable now and long live the bookworm.

    Tags: debian gnu linux
    Updated on: 2023-04-30