Troubleshooting¶

ODE¶

Import error

It means the ode module could not be imported by the Python interpreter.

>>> import ode
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: libode.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This error is saying that ODE needs access access to the compiled library (as a shared object, e.g. libode.so.3) but can’t find it. It is not about whether sys.path contains or not the location of the library.

Dynamically linked libraries are looked up in the system library path, i.e. the directories included in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. However, instead of manually fixing this value, try running ldconfig –its job is to “configure dynamic linker run-time bindings” (man page)– and import ode again. Hopefully you’ll get no output, which means it was imported correctly.

VTK¶

vtkXOpenGLRenderWindow

If VTK looks to be installed correctly (e.g. it can be imported with no errors) but while running a program using VTK you get an error mentioning vtkXOpenGLRenderWindow, then probably you have an error related to your video card, its drivers and OpenGL. You can test the latter works fine by running the programs glxgears or glxinfo at the command line (if they are not found you can install them with sudo apt-get install mesa-utils).