[HOWTO] Fixing the problem with SecondLife/Linux crashing on launch

A month or so I tried to fire up SecondLife to poke around a bit and look into the possibility of starting up a new t-shirt shop inworld, but for some reason the SecondLife viewer window opens, but before it could show the initial window the viewer crashed. Running it from the terminal didn’t help much because I couldn’t look through all the information to find out why SL crashed. I’ve tried to look at the problem again a few times but could never find out quite why SL always crashed. I knew it wasn’t because of my video drivers because I have the nonfree Nvidia drivers installed, partly because I know SL seems to have the non-free drivers. Today I had the time to give it another shot, and I got yet another crash. Today I was able to slowly scroll through the messages in the terminal and was finally able to find this line:

do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin: fcmatch.c:850: IA__FcFontSort: Assertion `result != ((void *)0)’ failed.

That game me something to search for, and I was able to find a bug on SL’s bug tracker. [#STORM-1854] Linux Viewer crashes on startup after update to Fontconfig 2.9.0 has several people confirming it on their system, including on Debian Wheezy, the basis for my installation of Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). The 7th comment has a fix from Kephra Nurmi that worked for me.

I found an easy fix, to get even old Secondlife binaries running again!

Download:
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/f/fontconfig/libfontconfig1_2.8.0-2.1_i386.deb
Unpack it:
mkdir t
cd t
ar xv ../libfontconfig1_2.8.0-2.1_i386.deb
tar xvfz data.tar.gz
Copy the library to your Secondlife library directory:
cp usr/lib/* ~/SecondLife-i686-1.23.5.136262/lib/
Clean up:
cd ..
rm -rf t libfontconfig1_2.8.0-2.1_i386.deb

I realize that may be Greek to a lot of people, so I’ll try to simplify it. These instructions will ignore the terminal for those who need to use the GUI to fix this incredibly annoying bug.

• First download the older libconfig file from http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/f/fontconfig/libfontconfig1_2.8.0-2.1_i386.deb and save it someplace handy.
• Once the file is downloaded, open a file manager window to the place you saved it. Most browsers will allow you to right-click on the file in the download window/bar and select something like Show in Folder. Now extract the file. I used the option on the context (right-click) menu to Extract Archive Here, Autodetect Subfilder just to make it a little easier to find where the files are extracted to.
• This will give you two archives, control.tar.gz and data.tar.gz. Extract the contents of data.tar.gz, which will give you a folder named usr, and inside that folder will be folders named lib and share. Go into the lib folder, and you’ll see files named libfontconfig.so.1 (actually a system link) and libfontconfig.so.1.4.4.
• In a separate window or tab go to where you run SecondLife from. Go into the lib folder and copy both libfontconfig.so.1 and libfontconfig.so.1.4.4 into the SecondLife/lib folder.

That’s actually all there is to it. You should now be able to run SecondLife normally, and as Kephra said you can safely remove the .deb package you downloaded and all the extracted files from it, as long as you have copied the files into your SecondLife/lib folder and didn’t create system links. If this fixes things for you you’ll probably want to hold on to the .deb package so you have it in case you upgrade your SecondLife viewer and need to apply this fix all over again.

Yooooouge thanks to SecondLife user Kephra Nurmi for providing the information I had been looking for. As Kephra says, your mileage may vary but hopefully that will fix things for you. Let me know your results in the comments, and look for me in SecondLife as Peng Barthelmess. You may even find Nanci online  (Nanci Barthelmess) but from talking with her I’m not sure if she’s planning on going back on SL at this point, which is a shame. I hear she made some great friends there.

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