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Accepted
Zeke Egherman
Asked: 2018-02-06 11:00:10 +0800 CST

Nautilus wont launch (Symbol lookup error)

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Very confused on this one. Been looking around and all the answers I have found have been insufficient. Whenever I launch Nautilus, I get the error:

nautilus: symbol lookup error: nautilus: undefined symbol: gtk_flow_box_get_child_at_pos

The same thing appears when I try and use sudo nautilus or nautilus -q, or even sudo nautilus -q. I have tried enabling icons in Gnome tweaks, updating Ubuntu, updating GTK, reinstalling nautilus, and am out of ideas. 

$ uname -a
Linux ThinkPad-T430 4.13.0-32-generic #35-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jan 25 09:13:46 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ apt-cache policy nautilus libgtk-3-0
nautilus:
  Installed: 1:3.26.0-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 1:3.26.0-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 1:3.26.0-0ubuntu1 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu artful/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
libgtk-3-0:
  Installed: 3.22.25-0ubuntu0.1
  Candidate: 3.22.25-0ubuntu0.1
  Version table:
 *** 3.22.25-0ubuntu0.1 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu artful-updates/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     3.22.24-0ubuntu1 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu artful/main amd64 Packages

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 17.10
Release:    17.10
Codename:   artful

$ ldd $(which nautilus) | grep gtk
    libgtk-3.so.0 => /usr/local/lib/libgtk-3.so.0 (0x00007f2f858a3000)

$ readlink -f /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgtk-3.so.0
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgtk-3.so.0.2200.25

$ nm -D /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgtk-3.so.0 | grep flow_box_get_child
00000000001de3a0 T gtk_flow_box_get_child_at_index
00000000001de510 T gtk_flow_box_get_child_at_pos

$ echo "$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

$ cat /etc/ld.so.conf{,.d/*.conf}
include /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfakeroot
# Multiarch support
/lib/i386-linux-gnu
/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu
/lib/i686-linux-gnu
/usr/lib/i686-linux-gnu
/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa
# libc default configuration
/usr/local/lib
# Multiarch support
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa-egl
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa
$ type -a nautilus; which -a nautilus | xargs -rd '\n' -- readlink -f --
nautilus is /usr/bin/nautilus
/usr/bin/nautilus
gnome nautilus

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You have a second installation of libgtk3 in /usr/local/lib that is incompatible with Nautilus (and likely other GTK applications from the package repository). Please either remove that GTK installation altogether or remove /usr/local/lib from the default search path for shared libraries.

    I recommend the former (deinstallation of the GTK library) as it appears you don't know how it got there which means it likely servers no (more) purpose:

    1. Go to the source code directory from which you originally built and installed the GTK library to /usr/local/lib. It should contain a file called Makefile or GNUmakefile.

    2. Invoke its uninstallation routine:

      sudo make uninstall
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