Gallery. Finally!
Posted on August 30, 2004 by Scott Leberknight
Singley and I finally got Gallery installed tonight. We had failed in two previous attempts, the first time because we underestimated the amount of time it would take and the second time because we were having trouble getting NetPBM, an image manipulation toolkit, installed. It turned out the problem was that NetPBM was placing the .so library files in its own location, specifically in /usr/local/pbm/lib. Unfortunately this meant that the NetPBM executables were unable to find the .so libraries and therefore refused to work.
After mucking around a bit we had to change LD_LIBRARY_PATH for the Gallery installation to include /usr/local/pbm/lib. After that everything worked perfectly. Sometimes it is amazing anything actually works, what with all the ridiculous amounts of complexity and dependencies that are present in complex systems.
Later I came across this article by David Barr titled "Why LD_LIBRARY_PATH is bad". After reading it I tend to agree. The caveat is that I am a developer, not a systems adminstrator and would never claim to be any sort of an expert in these matters.
Anyway, the final result of our efforts is at our photo gallery.