Re: Netrunner

On Saturday, 27 February 2021 at 11:20:15 am UTC+11, Geri Atricks wrote:
> netrunner crashes saying "Unable to initialize video" 

This is not your fault, the Netrunner binary looks for the libraries in the wrong path.

You can fix this with a command like:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libSDL2-2.0.so.0 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libSDL2.so

Long explanation:

If you run Netrunner under a system call trace like:

 strace -vffttT -o strace.txt ./netrunner

Then look in the "strace.txt" file, you will see it's trying to open "libSDL2.so" under many different library paths, but it never finds SDL2 so it can't start the graphical interface.

If you list the contents of the SDL2 library package with:

 dpkg-query -L libsdl2-2.0-0

You will see the library file is actually called "libSDL2-2.0.so.0" and not "libSDL2.so" which Netrunner is looking for.

So we make a symlink from the actual library filename to the filename which Netrunner expects, and it works.

Maybe Netrunner is built on an older Ubuntu (18.04 or earlier?) which had a different filename for the SDL2 library.