Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Decompressing ZIP file error, 0x80004005 Unspecified error (Windows) OR File is broken (7zip)

Problem:
I torrented an operating system which contained a ZIP file of an ISO and some instructions, but when I went to decompress the ZIP file I was met by errors in Windows Explorer and 7-Zip.

Windows Explorer error:
An unexpected error is keeping you from copying the file. If you continue to receive this error, you can use the error code to search for help with this problem.

Error 0x80004005: Unexpected error

7-Zip error:
0 C:\Users\username\Downloads\Linux.zip
1 CRC failed in 'Linux'. File is broken.


Solution:
Remembering a compression suite from back in the day, I decided to try WinRAR and it worked. No errors were displayed and the operating system ISO had no issues when checked pre-install. I have no doubt that the ZIP file I had must have had an error, but only WinRAR was able to fix the problem.

Update: Apparently 7-Zip now can handle this issue. Thanks Terry!

Thursday, January 5, 2012

pdf2swf: cannot open shared object file. No such file or directory

Problem:
After compiling swftools on my linux box, I did some other tasks and then went to convert a pdf to swf file. When running the conversion, I was met with the following error:

/user/local/bin/pdf2swf: error while loading shared libraries: libjpeg.so.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Solution:
This is due to where the libjpeg files are and where pdf2swf is looking for them. Looking at their documentation for installation, I found this:

Furthermore, a new installation of jpeglib (the following assumes it's in /usr/local/lib) often requires doing a:

 ranlib /usr/local/lib/libjpeg.a
 ldconfig /usr/local/lib

I executed these lines and everything went back to running smoothly. 

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Fedora 15/16 Fails to Load GUI after Started SYSV on VM

Problem:
I'm running a Fedora distribution on VirtualBox on my PC and really like working with Fedora, however recently I found that Fedora would halt loading the GUI without errors and the last thing it said was Started SYSV.



Solution:
Remove NVidia Drivers and/or restore nouveau following the steps listed here. If you do not have nvidia drivers, you can delete the xorg.conf (or back it up) and continue to force dracut.

Steps:
I didn't have any idea why this happened initially, so here are the steps I took to figure it out. I could boot into recovery mode just fine, and I could switch to another text terminal (using CTRL + ALT + F2 or any F-key). I logged in with root and switched to run level 3 (/sbin/init 3). This worked fine, so I tried starting Xorg and it failed telling me an error with NVidia.

Following the steps in this blog solved my problem, hopefully it can solve yours too.

NOTE: In one of my tests, I was able to get a similar error but it was not NVidia related. I deleted my xorg.conf as is specified in the blog I link to and force dracut. When booting up, the system loaded the GUI and provided an error message forcing me to logout. Once I had done so, I was able to login and everything worked perfectly.