cannot open "executables"?

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#1

I recently installed 11.4. It’s awesome. But when I tried to run opensong portable from my flash drive–the same file that I ran in openSUSE 11.3–it gives this dialog:

There is no application installed that can open files of the type executable (application/x-executable).
Do you want to try to install one?

When I clicked “Install”, it opened up yast and installed “TrackBalls”, a game. I don’t know how trackballs is supposed to help me run opensong.

What am I missing? There should be no reason that I can’t run this linux executable, right?

Thanks.

#2

This looks like a Windows app from the .paf.exe suffix. It won’t work on Linux. Not everything in SF runs on Linux. In addition it looks like nothing has been worked on since 2009.

#3

On 03/23/2011 05:06 AM, ken yap wrote:
>
> This looks like a Windows app from the .paf.exe suffix. It won’t work on
> Linux. Not everything in SF runs on Linux. In addition it looks like
> nothing has been worked on since 2009.

since he says “the same file that I ran in openSUSE 11.3” i guess on
11.3 he had WINE installed as well as it and the desktop/system
configured so that .exe automatically were opened by WINE…

maybe…

–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP posted w/openSUSE 11.3, KDE4.5.5, Thunderbird3.1.8, nVidia
173.14.28 3D, Athlon 64 3000+]
“It is far easier to read, understand and follow the instructions than
to undo the problems caused by not.” DD 23 Jan 11

#4

No. It’s not a Windows executable. It’s the Linux executable from the .deb archive here: downloads [OpenSong.org]. It ran in Ubuntu and openSUSE 11.3 and I have never installed Wine. What makes it portable is that you don’t have to install the .deb. You just extract the executable onto a flash drive. So, I’ve got the Windows executable and the Linux executable on the same flash drive so I can run the same presentations on different computers.

#5

Well I find it confusing, because it seems that there are two SF projects: opensong and opensong portable. Since you wrote opensong portable, I went to the website for that and only found an old .paf.exe.

At the SF opensong project I only see a DEB package, which is for Debian/Ubuntu. I don’t know if you can convert it to a RPM. However there is no guarantee that an executable compiled for Debian/Ubuntu will run on openSUSE. In fact that is no guarantee that a given executable will run on any platform other than the distro and release it was compiled for. Worst comes to worst you could build from the .tar.gz I suppose.

#6

Try to make a “Link to application …” with the path to the executable as command in Konqueror or Dolphin. And/Or place it in your Kmenu.

#7

At the SF opensong project I only see a DEB package, which is for Debian/Ubuntu. I don’t know if you can convert it to a RPM.

In oS 11.3, it didn’t matter. I don’t need to install on my computer, so it doesn’t need to be RPM. I just had to open the DEB in Ark and grab the one file, the executable application, and put it on a flash drive. And I could run it from the flash drive in openSUSE 11.3. (That’s what I meant by “portable”). But in 11.4, it’s not working.

Try to make a “Link to application …” with the path to the executable as command in Konqueror or Dolphin. And/Or place it in your Kmenu.

Could you tell me how to do that? Or point me to a web page that would show how?

#8

Presuming you are on KDE …

Use Dolphin and navigate to your Desktop folder. Right-click, select “Create new”, then “Link to application …”. In the dialog window that comes up, you give your custom application link a name and specify the path of the executable that you mention as the command.

Similar with the Menu Editor, only that you right-click on the KMenu, or what it is called, and then create an entry in your applications menu. (Alt+F2 and ‘kmenuedit’ works too).

Maybe that works. It is more a guess than anything else.

#9

The “Link” didn’t work. I created it on the Desktop, and when I click, it gives this message:

KDEInit could not launch ‘/media/SWISSMEMORY/OpenSong/opensong’.

I guess I just assumed that a linux executable file should open on any distribution of linux, but I guess I should put the issue to the opensong forums.

#10

On 03/22/2011 07:36 PM, MisterEwok wrote:
>
> I recently installed 11.4. It’s awesome. But when I tried to run
> opensong portable from my flash drive–the same file that I ran in
> openSUSE 11.3–it gives this dialog:
>
> There is no application installed that can open files of the type
> executable (application/x-executable).
> Do you want to try to install one?
>
> When I clicked “Install”, it opened up yast and installed “TrackBalls”,
> a game. I don’t know how trackballs is supposed to help me run
> opensong.
>
> What am I missing? There should be no reason that I can’t run this
> linux executable, right?
>
> Thanks.

Is the execute bit set on the file?
Is the flash drive mounted noexec?

–
Kevin Miller
Juneau, Alaska
http://www.alaska.net/~atftb
“In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.”

  • Lawrence Summers
#11

Is the execute bit set on the file?
Is the flash drive mounted noexec?

I don’t know where to find these options to check. How can I find out?

#12

On 03/23/2011 04:36 PM, MisterEwok wrote:
>
> I just had to open the DEB in Ark and grab
> the one file, the executable application, and put it on a flash drive.

i just downloaded the deb file [opensong_1.6.2-1_i386.deb], opened it
with Ark and there is no executable available anywhere in there!!

perhaps you were just lucky on 11.3 (anyway, i’ve never heard of
anyone being able to extract a single .exe file from a deb package and
get it to run

from what i see your options are:

  • use 11.3
  • ask the developer of OpenSong to provide an openSUSE usable rpm
  • download the source and compile the package yourself
  • ask a openSUSE packager to build a package for you

or

  • figure out how you were able to use it on 11.3
  • apply that to 11.4
  • wait for someone here to figure out what changed so that it doesn’t
    work with 11.4

–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP posted w/openSUSE 11.3, KDE4.5.5, Thunderbird3.1.8, nVidia
173.14.28 3D, Athlon 64 3000+]
“It is far easier to read, understand and follow the instructions than
to undo the problems caused by not.” DD 23 Jan 11

#13

i just downloaded the deb file [opensong_1.6.2-1_i386.deb], opened it
with Ark and there is no executable available anywhere in there!!

Since you’ve downloaded the DEB, I can point you to the file in question. In the “data.tar.gz” archive, it’s ./opt/OpenSong/opensong.

Okay, so I just extracted the thing again on my computer, and the “opensong” executable file runs from my computer!

I copy it to my flash drive and when I try to open it, I get the error message I quoted in my first post.

So why won’t it open from the flash drive?

#14

On 03/23/2011 06:36 PM, MisterEwok wrote:
>
>> Is the execute bit set on the file?
>> Is the flash drive mounted noexec?
>
> I don’t know where to find these options to check. How can I find out?

set it up the same way you did in 11.3

–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP posted w/openSUSE 11.3, KDE4.5.5, Thunderbird3.1.8, nVidia
173.14.28 3D, Athlon 64 3000+]
“It is far easier to read, understand and follow the instructions than
to undo the problems caused by not.” DD 23 Jan 11

#15

On 03/23/2011 07:36 PM, MisterEwok wrote:
>
>> i just downloaded the deb file [opensong_1.6.2-1_i386.deb], opened it
>> with Ark and there is no executable available anywhere in there!!
>
> Since you’ve downloaded the DEB, I can point you to the file in
> question. In the “data.tar.gz” archive, it’s ./opt/OpenSong/opensong.
>
> Okay, so I just extracted the thing again on my computer, and the
> “opensong” executable file runs from my computer!
>
> I copy it to my flash drive and when I try to open it, I get the error
> message I quoted in my first post.
>
> So why won’t it open from the flash drive?
>
>

ok, i took the file ./opt/OpenSong/opensong from inside data.tar.gz
(from the .deb) and i put it in a directory all by itself and tried to
execute it and that resulted in this error:

denverd@linux:~/temp/temp> ./opensong

(opensong:27516): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_hash_table_insert_internal:
assertion `hash_table != NULL’ failed
Runtime Error
Please report what caused this error along with the information below.
…/Common/plugin.cpp: 7439
Failure Condition: pluginEntryTable.GetEntry( entrypointName, out )
can’t find plugin method BevelButton.DeleteAllRows

i conclude that it is impossible to take this one executable file and
run it as a program…instead, as per normal, one must install the
application…a feat which is quite difficult from a deb file (others
have, but i have never successfully installed a program from a deb)…

but, the good news is that it should be rather easy to compile from
source–but, then it still probably won’t run from a
flashdrive…unless the maker has provided a step-by-step on how to
make OpenSong portable via flash…

you really really need to figure out how you did that on 11.3, and go
from there…

–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP posted w/openSUSE 11.3, KDE4.5.5, Thunderbird3.1.8, nVidia
173.14.28 3D, Athlon 64 3000+]
“It is far easier to read, understand and follow the instructions than
to undo the problems caused by not.” DD 23 Jan 11

#16

On 03/23/2011 09:36 AM, MisterEwok wrote:
>
>> Is the execute bit set on the file?
>> Is the flash drive mounted noexec?
>
> I don’t know where to find these options to check. How can I find out?

Plug your flash drive in. After it’s mounted (if you can read it, it’s
mounted) then go to the commmand line and type:
mount

The output will tell you how it’s mounted. For instance I just put in a
thumb drive and have the following line:


/dev/sdc1 on /media/disk type vfat
(rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,uid=1000,utf8,shortname=mixed,flush)

If it was mounted noexec that would be listed in the output.

To see if the file is executable, either
1: browse to it in dolphin and right click on it and select properties
and go to the permissions tab or
2: go to the command line, cd to the directory the file is saved and
type ‘ls -l’
(sans apostrophes)

You should do a bit of reading on Linux/Unix file permissions. It will
make things a lot easier for you.

HTH…

…Kevin

Kevin Miller
Juneau, Alaska
http://www.alaska.net/~atftb
“In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.”

  • Lawrence Summers
#17

On 2011-03-23 14:06, MisterEwok wrote:
>
> No. It’s not a Windows executable. It’s the Linux executable from the
> deb archive here: ‘downloads [OpenSong.org]’
> (http://opensong.org/d/downloads). It ran in Ubuntu and openSUSE 11.3
> and I have never installed Wine.

Is the external drive mounted noexec?

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

#18

I did nothing special in 11.3. It just worked. And now when I extract the data.tar.gz archive into my “Downloads” folder, I can run OpenSong from there, just as I should be able to from my flash drive.

When I type “mount” in terminal with my flash drive mounted, I get this line:

/dev/sdb1 on /media/SWISSMEMORY type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=100,fmask=0022,dmask=0077,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,showexec,utf8,errors=remount-ro,uhelper=udisks)

It does not say “noexec” in this output. However, when I look at the properties of the OpenSong executable on my flash drive, “Is executable” under “Permissions” is unchecked! And when I check it and press OK, it still is unchecked when I bring up the properties again.

So, it looks like I just need to know how to enable executability (if that’s a word) on my flash drive.

Thanks.

#19

On 03/31/2011 01:36 PM, MisterEwok wrote:
>
> I did nothing special in 11.3. It just worked. And now when I extract
> the data.tar.gz archive into my “Downloads” folder, I can run OpenSong
> from there, just as I should be able to from my flash drive.
>
> When I type “mount” in terminal with my flash drive mounted, I get this
> line:
>
> /dev/sdb1 on /media/SWISSMEMORY type vfat
> (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=100,fmask=0022,dmask=0077,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,showexec,utf8,errors=remount-ro,uhelper=udisks)
>
> It does not say “noexec” in this output. However, when I look at the
> properties of the OpenSong executable on my flash drive, “Is executable”
> under “Permissions” is unchecked! And when I check it and press OK, it
> still is unchecked when I bring up the properties again.
>
> So, it looks like I just need to know how to enable executability (if
> that’s a word) on my flash drive.

The reason you can’t change the executable bit on the file is probably
because it’s a vfat file system. It doesn’t understand Linux/UNIX
permission settings.

On my (Debian) system I created a short shell script that just runs ‘ls
-l’ and copied that to my flash drive. It executed fine.

I haven’t tried 11.4 yet though so can’t try it there. What happens if
you try running in from the flash drive plugged into another box?
(Hopefully you have or know someone with another flavor of Linux you can
test with).

Sorry I don’t have more to offer…

…Kevin

Kevin Miller
Juneau, Alaska
http://www.alaska.net/~atftb
“In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.”

  • Lawrence Summers
#20

On 2011-03-31 23:36, MisterEwok wrote:

> So, it looks like I just need to know how to enable executability (if
> that’s a word) on my flash drive.

Not doable, it is vfat which does not support linux permissions.

There is a method, but it changes every file: all would be executable, none
would be “openable”.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)