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Bug 368033

Summary: Can't get help in Gnome - silly error message
Product: Gentoo Linux Reporter: Alan Mackenzie <acm>
Component: [OLD] GNOMEAssignee: Gentoo Linux Gnome Desktop Team <gnome>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE    
Severity: normal CC: acm
Priority: Normal    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: AMD64   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Package list:
Runtime testing required: ---

Description Alan Mackenzie 2011-05-19 10:53:05 UTC
In every program in Gnome, there is a help menu.  When I click on any of
them, I get the wierd error message:

    Couldn't display help
    The specified location is not supported

Does this just mean "couldn't find file" or does it have some deeper
meaning?  More to the point, what do I have to do to fix this problem?
Comment 1 Gilles Dartiguelongue (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2011-05-19 12:05:41 UTC
do you have yelp installed ?
Comment 2 Alan Mackenzie 2011-05-19 12:11:42 UTC
Yes, I have yelp-2.30.2-r1 installed.
Comment 3 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-03 19:17:26 UTC
What xulrunner version do you have installed?
Comment 4 Alan Mackenzie 2011-06-03 19:58:07 UTC
I have net-libs/xulrunner-1.9.2.17.
Comment 5 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-03 20:46:27 UTC
I cannot reproduce this with latest yelp and xul-2, but cannot test with xul-1.9 and older yelp :-S
Comment 6 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-04 13:39:37 UTC
What does occur when manually running "yelp"?
Comment 7 Alan Mackenzie 2011-06-04 20:03:10 UTC
(In reply to comment #6)
> What does occur when manually running "yelp"?

Running without parameters (I don't know any other way), I get the normal "Welcome to the GNOME Help Browser" screen.  It works.
Comment 8 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-05 09:29:43 UTC
Try to run the following:
yelp ghelp:///usr/share/gnome/help/gnome-terminal/C/gnome-terminal.xml
Comment 9 Alan Mackenzie 2011-06-05 15:45:03 UTC
(In reply to comment #8)
> Try to run the following:
> yelp ghelp:///usr/share/gnome/help/gnome-terminal/C/gnome-terminal.xml

I get the help for GNOME Terminal, which works fine.
Comment 10 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-05 15:57:09 UTC
Open then gnome-terminal and press "F1"
Comment 11 Alan Mackenzie 2011-06-05 16:09:14 UTC
(In reply to comment #10)
> Open then gnome-terminal and press "F1"

I get the same error message as with <help>/<contents>.
Comment 12 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-05 16:14:41 UTC
Then:
1. Press F1
2. When the error message is shown and BEFORE closing it open a terminal and run:
"ps axu | grep help"

-> show its output here
Comment 13 Alan Mackenzie 2011-06-05 16:23:30 UTC
(In reply to comment #10)
> ....
> 2. When the error message is shown and BEFORE closing it open a terminal and
> run:
> "ps axu | grep help"

root        17  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   07:46   0:00 [khelper]
acm       5024  0.0  0.0  14384   776 tty20    S    15:30   0:00 gnome-pty-helper
acm       5277  0.0  0.0   9696   832 pts/1    S+   16:19   0:00 grep --colour=auto help
Comment 14 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-05 16:27:18 UTC
That shouldn't occur :-S, when you press "F1" or click in menu item to open help, gnome-help is launched and, then, something makes it to fail, are you sure did you run "ps" command while the error was being shown?
Comment 15 Alan Mackenzie 2011-06-05 16:30:27 UTC
root        17  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   07:46   0:00 [khelper]
acm       5024  0.0  0.0  14384   776 tty20    S    15:30   0:00 gnome-pty-helper
acm       5277  0.0  0.0   9696   832 pts/1    S+   16:19   0:00 grep --colour=auto help

> That shouldn't occur :-S, when you press "F1" or click in menu item to open
> help, gnome-help is launched and, then, something makes it to fail, are you
> sure did you run "ps" command while the error was being shown?

Yes indeed.  The same occurence of the error is still there.  I started the second xterm after this error.
Comment 16 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-05 16:31:23 UTC
You can also try looking for "yelp" process instead of "help" in "ps axu..."
Comment 17 Alan Mackenzie 2011-06-05 16:35:44 UTC
> You can also try looking for "yelp" process instead of "help" in "ps axu..."

acm@acm ~ $ ps axu | grep yelp
acm       5346  0.0  0.0   9692   828 pts/1    S+   16:32   0:00 grep --colour=auto yelp
Comment 18 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-05 16:40:16 UTC
Do you suffer this on a new created user account? Maybe other option would be to try to use latest yelp (but it would also require xulrunner-2 and co)
Comment 19 Alan Mackenzie 2011-06-05 17:04:22 UTC
(In reply to comment #18)
> Do you suffer this on a new created user account? Maybe other option would be
> to try to use latest yelp (but it would also require xulrunner-2 and co)

Yes, I've just created a new account, and it gets the same error messages.  :-(

What would be involved in moving to new versions of yelp and xulrunner?  Could there be an endless chain of other packages needing updating?
Comment 20 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-05 17:07:59 UTC
It depends on how many packages depending on xulrunner do you use, in my case, I needed to upgrade to firefox-4 and and few more... but it depends..
Comment 21 Alan Mackenzie 2011-06-05 17:48:09 UTC
(In reply to comment #20)
> It depends on how many packages depending on xulrunner do you use, in my case,
> I needed to upgrade to firefox-4 and and few more... but it depends..

I'm still fairly new to Gentoo here.  I've got ebuilds for Firefox 4.0.1-r1 and xulrunner-2.0.1-r1.  If I were to install them, how would I know which other packages needed updating?  Is there something like revdep-rebuild which would tell me?
Comment 22 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-06 09:57:35 UTC
Updating should be enough, but I think you should ask for help in forums.gentoo.org to not "pollute" this bug report, maybe they can also help you about original problem that looks a bit hard to reproduce. Good luck!
Comment 23 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-10 11:15:52 UTC
Does this problem also appear from apps running from launchers instead of run from gnome-terminal?
Comment 24 Alexandre Rostovtsev (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2011-06-10 18:14:13 UTC
If you are unable to update to xulrunner-2 for whatever reason, as a workaround try adding the following line to /usr/share/applications/yelp.desktop :

MimeType=x-scheme-handler/ghelp;x-scheme-handler/help;x-scheme-handler/info;x-scheme-handler/man;
Comment 25 Alan Mackenzie 2011-06-10 20:46:14 UTC
(In reply to comment #22)
> Updating should be enough, but I think you should ask for help in
> forums.gentoo.org to not "pollute" this bug report, maybe they can also help
> you about original problem that looks a bit hard to reproduce. Good luck!

I got an email tip yesterday from Guido Flohr.  It was to insert "/usr/share/gnome" into the path in environment variable XDG_DATA_DIRS.  This makes the help functionality work.

XDG_DATA_DIRS is an env-update variable.  Presumably, I'm missing something important in /etc/env.d/.
Comment 26 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-11 10:45:21 UTC
Maybe Alexandre's solution could also make this work ok, could you try that solution instead?
Comment 27 Alan Mackenzie 2011-06-12 03:15:58 UTC
(In reply to comment #26)
> Maybe Alexandre's solution could also make this work ok, could you try that
> solution instead?

That is, to insert this line at the end of /usr/share/applications/yelp.desktop:
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/ghelp;x-scheme-handler/help;x-scheme-handler/info;x-scheme-handler/man;

This doesn't work - I get the same error message when invoking help, namely
    "The specified location is not supported"
.
Comment 28 Pacho Ramos gentoo-dev 2011-06-12 10:54:14 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 370729 ***