Linux Troubleshooting

This page will document various issues that may come up while running the Linux version of X-Plane. If you have not yet managed to install X-Plane, please see the Linux installation page.

General troubleshooting

Contents

1 General troubleshooting
2 Specific issues
3 If all else fails…

If you are having issues with X-Plane, please check the “specific issues” section to see if your issue is listed. If it is not, then you may wish to try (in no particular order):

checking your OpenGL drivers. In particular, make sure that you have the latest version from your graphics card manufacturer; check the websites for AMD/ATI cards and for nVidia cards.
updating to the latest version. If you’re up to date, you can skip this step.
removing any plugins that you may have added. If you haven’t added any plugins, then you can skip this step.

Specific issues

X-Plane crashes immediately with a “glibc detected…” error

Some users with ATI/AMD graphics cards have reported that X-Plane crashes immediately on startup, even if installation went smoothly, with the following error (or one like it):

*** glibc detected *** ./X-Plane-i586: free(): invalid pointer: 0x0e3769d0 ***

This is a known interaction with the ATI drivers and X-Plane. If you see this on an nVidia system, please send X-Plane tech support an e-mail. This crash is usually avoidable using the MALLOC_CHECK_ environment variable. To set this, start X-Plane from the command line as such:

$ cd “/home/joshua/X-Plane 8.60”
$ MALLOC_CHECK_=1 ./X-Plane-i586

Obviously, these directions assume that you have installed X-Plane in /home/joshua/X-Plane 8.60, and that you’re using the i586 binaries. If your name is not Joshua, then you may have to change the path to wherever you installed X-Plane. Of special note is that MALLOC_CHECK_=1 must be on the same line as the X-Plane command; placing them on two separate lines will cause the shell to not export the MALLOC_CHECK_ environment variable to X-Plane and therefore cause this workaround to be ineffective.

If you would like a quick way to do this each time you start X-Plane, you may wish to make a shell script to start X-Plane.

X-Plane cannot find ATC chatter files

For some users, when X-Plane is launched from a file manager by double-clicking on the icon, X-Plane may not start properly, instead popping up an error like:

BE ADVISED. Could not find ATC chatter files! I am searching Resources/sounds/radio chatter/ (init_gen.cpp line 15)

X-Plane may pop up this error message even if the files are intact and in that folder.

X-Plane tries to auto-detect which folder it has been installed in, and sometimes is not successful in doing this. You can help X-Plane along by starting X-Plane from the command line inside the directory that you installed it in. To do this, start X-Plane from the command line, as such:

$ cd “/home/joshua/X-Plane 8.60”
$ ./X-Plane-i586

If you would like a quick way to do this each time you start X-Plane, you may wish to make a shell script to start X-Plane.

X-Plane exits after popping up a dialog saying “Could not get our host!”

When X-Plane starts up, it tries to find the IP address of the local machine by running the resolver on the machine’s hostname. On most machines, the machine’s hostname resolves to 127.0.0.1 (or something within the 127.0.0.0/8 netblock), as defined in /etc/hosts, but some distributions do not add this alias properly.

If you get this message, it’s usually indicative of this being the case. To fix this, you’ll need to edit your /etc/hosts to add a line like that. On my machine, which is named “rebirth” (i.e., when I run “hostname” at the command line, it prints the string “rebirth”), then I have a line in /etc/hosts that says:

127.0.1.1 rebirth

If you have difficulty editing /etc/hosts by hand, you may run the following command at a root shell, and it will add the appropriate line automatically. Make sure to copy and paste the command exactly; the shell is picky about what it accepts.

(echo; echo 127.0.0.1 $(hostname)) >> /etc/hosts

X-Plane (or any of the X-apps) abruptly exit. On the terminal, the message “Killed” appears.

This is usually an indication that your system has run out of memory and swap. When the Linux kernel runs out of virtual memory, it chooses a process to kill — usually, it chooses the process that is using the most memory on the system. X-Plane uses a lot of memory, and when the system runs out, X-Plane gets killed.

We recommend that you run X-Plane with the minimum requirements. Anything below that will make your system swap heavily and will make X-Plane unusably slow.

If this message still appears even with what you believe to be a sufficient amount of memory and swap, please e-mail the output of the commands “free” and “cat /proc/meminfo” to X-Plane tech support.

Loss of Audio

Some users of Ubuntu 9.10 have reported that, after flying in X-Plane for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, the sim will suddenly stop putting out sound, although it will still take input from the joystick, the menus will still work, etc. After this happens, the sim will lock up when the user tries to close it.

This is caused by a conflict between X-Plane and PulseAudio which, curiously, seems to be limited to Ubuntu 9.10. This can be fixed either by removing PulseAudio entirely (as described here in the Ubuntu forums) or by upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04.

Both the problem and the solution are described further here on the X-Plane.org forums.

If all else fails…

If all else fails, please send X-Plane tech support an e-mail. Be sure to read through that entire page (or at least skim it) so that your e-mail is as helpful as possible.

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