Hi, I hope to get some advice on which video engine to install prior to installing ELAN on Ubuntu 11.4.

I intend to use AVI files (appr. 4500 kb).

Which program(s) work the best?

Thank you in advance...

Best regards
Michael Bønnelykke

Hi Michael,

ELAN already includes a video engine, based on fobs and ffmpeg. However, the engine depends on some older library versions (libstdc++ in particular) so it cannot activate on newer Linux versions without installing those old libraries first. This means that instead of many video formats, none will be supported. AVI in general should not be a problem for ELAN.

Please read the other threads in this forum to see which old libraries you have to add for compatibility. It is no problem for Ubuntu to have old and new versions of the same library installed at the same time. If you are lucky, adding a single compatibility library with a few clicks in the Synaptic package manager of Ubuntu or the Ubuntu package website will be enough.

Regards, Eric

PS: You will have to install the 32 bit versions of the libraries needed by ELAN.

Dear Eric, thanks for your kind reply.

I have tried to look around

I have downloaded libc5++ with no reponse, but I do now realize that I have a response while installing ELAN:

strings: '/lib/libc.so.6': No such file
raw jre dir:
jre dir:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH:
LD_PRELOAD:

I have searched ubuntu, but can not find the prober solution. Do you by any means have a quick fix?

Best regards

Michael Bønnelykke

Hi! Now that you mention it, I do remember a problem with the installer on recent Linux distros. Here is a forward of my bug report from 8th of July 2011. If you do not have the "patch" tool, you can open ELAN_411_linux_novm_install.bin (or any other version) in a good text editor and change the line which says nptl ... strings /lib/libc.so.... into saying nptl ... strings /li*/libc.so... - make sure to not change any of the gibberish at the end and make sure to not change the length of the line, just replace the "lib" part with "li*"... If you still cannot run the installer, do "unset PS1" in the same shell window before you run the installer, this will stop the "user@host:directory>" prompt from being displayed. The installer has a problem with the backslash-u escape which means "show user name as part of prompt" here, while the installer thinks it is an Unicode escape. Sigh... The last problem, as said, is that you need libstdc++5 to use the media player in ELAN.



To be able to install ELAN 4.1.1 at all, I had to patch
the installer as follows:

> > --- ELAN_411_linux_novm_install.bin.org 2011-07-07 22:47:25.000000000 +0200
> > +++ ELAN_411_linux_novm_install.bin 2011-07-07 23:05:28.000000000 +0200
> > @@ -2261,7 +2261,7 @@
> > if [ `uname` = "Linux" -a -n "`which strings 2>/dev/null`" ]; then
> > debugOut "checking for NPTL + JVM vulernability..."
> > #check libc to see if it was compiled with NPTL
> > - nptl="`strings /lib/libc.so.6 | grep -i nptl`"
> > + nptl="`strings /li*/libc.so.6 | grep -i nptl`"
> > if [ "$nptl" ]; then
> > debugOut "NPTL detected! checking for vulnerable JVM....";
> >
This is because I only have /lib64/libc.so.6 and no /lib/libc.so.6
(maybe you mean /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 but the names vary)

The next problem was that I got this error:

> > java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Malformed \uxxxx encoding.
Luckily a workaround could be found on the web:

> > chmod u+x ./ELAN_411_linux_novm_install.bin
> > unset PS1
> > ./ELAN_411_linux_novm_install.bin
> > export PS1='\u@\h:\w\$ '
For example this forum mentions the workaround:

http://forums.skifta.com/topic/install-anywhere-linux-specifically-ubuntu-malformed-uxxxx-encoding

Because I already used older ELAN before, I already have the
old C++ library installed which is needed by the media player:

>> > > dpkg-query -S /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5
> > libstdc++5: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5

People who do not have "libstdc++5" yet can search it on the
http://packages.ubuntu.com/ homepage, often in the 386 and
backports subsection for their distro. Packages from a bit
older versions of Ubuntu usually work as well.

I hope part of those problems can be solved in the download of
ELAN, but some of the workarounds will also have to be explained
on the download web page.



PS: If the layout of this post gets messed up, please assume that most places with a "> " are supposed to be at the start of a new line.