I have a Brother printer.
Its drivers are installed from a .deb file.
Installing these drivers puts library files in /lib32
Sometimes, doing a system update interferes with these library files, so that they look like this
Notice every library is 727444 bytes.
When that happens, spooling of prints does not work.
The fix is easy, I do
[nevj@trinity lib32]$ su
Password:
# rm libbrcompij2.so.1.0
# ln -s libbrcompij2.so.1.0.2 libbrcompij2.so.1.0
# rm libbrcompij2.so.1
# ln -s libbrcompij2.so.1.0 libbrcompij2.so.1
# rm libbrcompij2.so
# ln -s libbrcompij2.so.1 libbrcompij2.so
# exit
Then they look like this
Notice there is a cascade of pointers, and only the bottom library is an actual file.
Then the print spooling works.
So, I am asking
- why does an update/upgrade interfere with a set of libraries plonked there by a .deb file installing drivers?
- why is the print spooling process so sensitive to whether these libraries are real files or links?
The package system does not ‘know’ about these libraries… they were not installed with ‘apt’… I used ‘dpkg’. Normally such files are ignored by apt operations… but not this time?
Even stranger. There are other library files installed by the brother printer .deb file, in the /lib64 directory, and they always retain their pointer structure under updates/upgrades. Only the libraries in /lib32 are affected.
I suspect it is something to do with ldconfig… does anyone understand ldconfig?
Any ideas?