Problems with Frescobaldi and LilyPond

[Ralph Palmer]

Greetings -

I have a fairly unique problem, I think/hope.

I recently had to have my laptop completely re-setup with Ubuntu 22.04. The outfit that did it renamed my "Home" from rpalmer to ralph. They also managed to get rid of all my data and program files. I was able to do a full restore from my backup disk, but I couldn't get Frescobaldi or LilyPond to work.

I have installed Frescobaldi 3.2 and LilyPond 2.23.9. Frescobaldi seems to load correctly, and I can view a saved LilyPond file. However, when I try to compile, I get the following message :

%%%%%%%%%%

Starting lilypond 2.23.6 [banishMisfortune.ly] . . .

/home/ralph/bin/lilypond: 4: exec: /home/ralph/lilypond/usr/bin/lilypond: not found

Exited with return code 127.

%%%%%%%%%%%

When I run "lilypond" from the terminal, I get the same message (see the attached screen shot). I think I used to make adjustments to PATH:, but I can't even find PATH.

Should I try a complete uninstall of LilyPond and Frescobaldi and start from scratch?

I appreciate any help and/or advice you can give.

All the best,

Ralph

--

Ralph Palmer

Seattle

USA

(he, him, his)

palmer....@gmail.com

[David Wright]

On Sun 22 May 2022 at 19:27:08 (-0700), Ralph Palmer wrote:
>
> I recently had to have my laptop completely re-setup with Ubuntu 22.04. The
> outfit that did it renamed my "Home" from rpalmer to ralph. They also
> managed to get rid of all my data and program files. I was able to do a
> full restore from my backup disk, but I couldn't get Frescobaldi or
> LilyPond to work.
>
> I have installed Frescobaldi 3.2 and LilyPond 2.23.9. Frescobaldi seems to
> load correctly, and I can view a saved LilyPond file. However, when I try
> to compile, I get the following message :
>
> %%%%%%%%%%
> Starting lilypond 2.23.6 [banishMisfortune.ly] . . .
> /home/ralph/bin/lilypond: 4: exec: /home/ralph/lilypond/usr/bin/lilypond:
> not found
> Exited with return code 127.
> %%%%%%%%%%%
>
> When I run "lilypond" from the terminal, I get the same message (see the
> attached screen shot). I think I used to make adjustments to PATH:, but I
> can't even find PATH.
>
> Should I try a complete uninstall of LilyPond and Frescobaldi and start
> from scratch?
>
> I appreciate any help and/or advice you can give.

When you type lilypond at the command prompt, it's running "lilypond"
from your ~/bin directory, which suggests that that directory is in
your $PATH, very conventional.

However, it looks as if the script that it runs is for an old version,
2.23.6, and that version is the last to use the old installation
layout, originally created by running a shell script. It looks as if
you have a number of entries in your ~/bin file that resemble what's
in my own installation of 2.22.1, which I'll list here:

lrwxrwxrwx abc2ly
lrwxrwxrwx convert-ly
lrwxrwxrwx etf2ly
-rwxr-x--- lilypond
lrwxrwxrwx lilypond-book
lrwxrwxrwx lilypond-invoke-editor
-rwxr-x--- lilypond-wrapper.guile
-rwxr-x--- lilypond-wrapper.python3
lrwxrwxrwx midi2ly
lrwxrwxrwx mup2ly
lrwxrwxrwx musicxml2ly
-rwxr-x--- uninstall-lilypond

If you cat lilypond, it'll likely resemble:

$ cat lilypond
#!/bin/sh
me=`basename $0`
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/home/auser/lilypond/usr/lib"
exec "/home/auser/lilypond/usr/bin/$me" "$@"
$

I imagine what's happened is that your main LP installation,
which was at /home/R/lilypond/ (where R stands for rpalmer
or ralph), has been deleted (as you reported), but the scripts
in /home/R/bin/, which used to point to it, are still present.

The uninstall-lilypond script is designed to clean out all the
various parts of an installation, BUT if it's there, I wouldn't
run it until you've read the last few lines of it, to see what
it will remove. I'm going to guess that your new installation
of LP is in /home/R/lilypond-2.23.9/ and that the uninstall
script is going to try to remove files in /home/R/lilypond/,
in which case it should be ok so long as you haven't put lots
of your own goodies in the latter.

--

Once you've got that done, then Frescobaldi needs to be told where LP
is, which I'm guessing is, as I said, /home/R/lilypond-2.23.9/lilypond.
There's presumably a F~ menu item to do that.

You can check that location by running LP from the command line with:

$ /home/R/lilypond-2.23.9/lilypond

or

$ ~/lilypond-2.23.9/lilypond

If you get this far and it all works, then that just leaves the PATH
mystery to solve. If nothing after the -- works, then I would guess
that you might have downloaded lilypond 2.23.9, but not unpacked it.
(One doesn't "install" these new versions with a script.) Just post
again for help.

Cheers,
David.

[Kevin Cole]

I guess I would have gone the other way and renamed the user rpalmer again... (The following may not be the BEST way to do it but gets the job done.)

sudo -i

for x in group* gshadow* passwd* shadow* subgid* subuid*

do

   perl -p -i -e "s/ralph/rpalmer/g;" $x

done

mv /home/ralph /home/rpalmer

exit

That finds "ralph" in all of the login-related files and changes the string to "rpalmner", then as a final step (the most critical to you) it renames your home directory back to rpalmer.

[Ralph Palmer]

Thanks to all who have participated in this thread! After much anguish, a major restart, and following Kevin Cole's advice, I'm now successfully running LilyPond 2.23.6 and Frescobaldi 3.2. I think I'll wait awhile before upgrading to LilyPond 2.23.9. Whew!

All the best,

Ralph