desktop

Fixing GNOME Not Loading After Installing FUSE on Ubuntu

 in Bash / GNU/Linux  tagged bash / desktop / fuse / gnome / GNU/Linux / ubuntu by

Recently, I ran into an interesting issue while working on my Ubuntu system. After installing FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace), my GNOME desktop environment stopped loading, leaving me at a blank screen or stuck in a loop with no graphical interface. If you find yourself in a similar situation, don’t worry. This post walks you through the issue and provides a simple fix.

The Problem: GNOME Fails to Load After FUSE Installation

FUSE is a powerful tool that allows non-privileged users to create their own file systems without modifying the kernel code. However, after installing FUSE on my Ubuntu machine, I rebooted to find that the GNOME desktop environment wouldn’t load.

I tried rebooting several times, hoping the issue would resolve itself. Unfortunately, it didn’t. I could still access the terminal using Ctrl + Alt + F2, but my desktop environment was completely unresponsive. This kind of issue can often occur due to broken or missing desktop packages.

The Solution: Reinstall the ubuntu-desktop Package

The issue likely arose from a corrupted or missing GNOME/desktop package. The good news is that this is fixable with a simple command:

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sudo apt install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop

This command reinstalls the GNOME desktop environment and other essential packages, restoring the graphical interface.

How to Apply the Fix

There are two main methods to fix the issue depending on your situation. Either you can use Recovery Mode to reinstall the desktop environment or you can do it from a terminal session using Ctrl + Alt + F2.

Method 1: Using Recovery Mode

Recovery Mode is your best option if you’re stuck at the GNOME loading screen and can’t access the terminal or graphical interface. Here’s how you can fix it:

  1. Reboot Your System and Enter Recovery Mode:
  • On system startup, hold down the Shift key to bring up the GRUB menu.
  • From the GRUB menu, select Advanced options for Ubuntu.
  • Select a kernel with the suffix (recovery mode).
  1. Enable Networking:
  • In the recovery menu, select network to enable networking. This is necessary because you will need access to the internet to download any missing or broken packages.
  1. Reinstall ubuntu-desktop:
  • Once networking is enabled, select the root option to drop into a root shell.
  • Run the following command:
    bash sudo apt install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
  1. Reboot the System:
    After the installation is complete, reboot your system using the following command:
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sudo reboot

Your GNOME desktop should now load without any issues.

Method 2: Using a Second Terminal Session (Ctrl + Alt + F2)

If your system boots but the GNOME desktop environment does not load properly, you can fix the issue from a second terminal session.

  1. Open a Second Terminal:
  • Press Ctrl + Alt + F2 to open a new terminal session. This will allow you to log into a non-graphical session.
  1. Reinstall the Desktop Environment:
    Once logged in, run the following command to reinstall the desktop environment:
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sudo apt install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
  1. Reboot:
    After the installation completes, reboot your system:
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sudo reboot

Once the system boots up again, GNOME should load as expected.

https://youtu.be/VrBgV178dMg

Why This Happens

The root cause of this issue is often related to the FUSE installation process modifying or corrupting some of the desktop environment packages. Installing FUSE doesn’t directly interfere with GNOME, but package conflicts or incomplete installations sometimes can break the environment. In this case, reinstalling ubuntu-desktop restores the missing components, resolving the issue.

Conclusion

If your GNOME desktop environment stops loading after installing FUSE, don’t panic. By either using the Recovery Mode or accessing a terminal via Ctrl + Alt + F2, you can quickly reinstall the ubuntu-desktop package and bring your system back to life. This solution should get your desktop environment running again without any data loss or the need for a complete reinstallation of Ubuntu.

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Viber Desktop on Fedora 27 64bit: Viber cannot connect to the internet (OpenSSL error) 1

 in Applications  tagged desktop / exec / fedora / find / find exec with pipe / libssl / libssl.so.10 / linux / ln / ln -s / nm / openssl / sh / sh -c / so / SSL_library_init / SSLv23_client_method / viber / viber desktop by

After updating our GNU/Linux distribution from Fedora 26 to Fedora 27, and maybe updating Viber Desktop client as well, Viber stopped working. To be more precise it could not connect to the internet any more. (Note: we used the RPM package of Viber Desktop to install Viber on our Fedora system).

Solution for the OpenSSL issue – Create a symbolic link to the missing library in the libraries folder of Viber

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#Make sure all necessary packages are installed
sudo dnf install openssl openssl-devel;
#Create a symbolic link from the system installed libssl shared object to the Viber installation folder
sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/libssl.so.10 /opt/viber/lib/libssl.so;

Explanation and details – Optional Reading

To find the installation folder of Viber, we used the following command:

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find / -iname viber 2>/dev/null;

that led us to the installation location of Viber which was /opt/viber/Viber.

Executing the binary in a terminal gave us the following errors

$ /opt/viber/Viber
 Qt WebEngine ICU data not found at /opt/viber/resources. Trying parent directory...
 Qt WebEngine resources not found at /opt/viber/resources. Trying parent directory...
 Qt WebEngine ICU data not found at /opt/viber/resources. Trying parent directory...
 Qt WebEngine resources not found at /opt/viber/resources. Trying parent directory...
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve CRYPTO_num_locks
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve CRYPTO_set_id_callback
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve CRYPTO_set_locking_callback
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve ERR_free_strings
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve EVP_CIPHER_CTX_cleanup
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve EVP_CIPHER_CTX_init
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve sk_new_null
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve sk_push
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve sk_free
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve sk_num
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve sk_pop_free
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve sk_value
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve SSL_library_init
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve SSL_load_error_strings
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve SSL_get_ex_new_index
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve SSLv23_client_method
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve SSLv23_server_method
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve X509_STORE_CTX_get_chain
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve OPENSSL_add_all_algorithms_noconf
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve OPENSSL_add_all_algorithms_conf
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve SSLeay
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot resolve SSLeay_version
 qt.network.ssl: Incompatible version of OpenSSL
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot call unresolved function SSLv23_client_method
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot call unresolved function SSL_library_init
 QQuickItem: Cannot set activeFocusOnTab to false once item is the active focus item.
 QQuickItem: Cannot set activeFocusOnTab to false once item is the active focus item.
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot call unresolved function SSLv23_client_method
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot call unresolved function SSL_library_init
 QQuickItem: Cannot set activeFocusOnTab to false once item is the active focus item.
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot call unresolved function SSLv23_client_method
 qt.network.ssl: QSslSocket: cannot call unresolved function SSL_library_init

From the error we could see that the application was trying to access the functions SSLv23_client_method and SSL_library_init and it could not find them.
It was obvious that the missing functions were related to the SSL protocol, so we executed the following to make sure all necessary OpenSSL packages were installed.

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sudo dnf install openssl openssl-devel;

After that we tried Viber again and gave us the same error.
So we made the assumption that Viber could not ‘see’ the installation of OpenSSL.
Then we decided to use the following command to:

  1. find all shared objects (shared libraries) of OpenSSL on our system,
  2. list all of the available functions in each shared library and
  3. identify the ones that contain the SSLv23_client_method method.
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find / -iname libssl.so* -print -exec sh -c 'nm -D "$1" | grep SSLv23_client_method' _ {} \; 2>/dev/null;

Executing the command yielded the following results:

$ find / -iname libssl.so* -print -exec sh -c 'nm -D "$1" | grep SSLv23_client_method' _ {} \; 2>/dev/null;
 /usr/lib/libssl.so
 /usr/lib/libssl.so.1.1
 /usr/lib/libssl.so.10
 00027880 T SSLv23_client_method
 /usr/lib/libssl.so.1.0.2m
 00027880 T SSLv23_client_method
 /usr/lib/libssl.so.1.1.0g
 /usr/lib64/libssl.so
 /usr/lib64/libssl.so.1.1
 /usr/lib64/libssl.so.10
 000000000002dd10 T SSLv23_client_method
 /usr/lib64/libssl.so.1.0.2m
 000000000002dd10 T SSLv23_client_method
 /usr/lib64/libssl.so.1.1.0g
 /opt/viber/lib/libssl.so

From the results two libraries in the lib64 folder got our interest, so we executed ls -l on both to check them out:

$ ls -l /usr/lib64/libssl.so.10 /usr/lib64/libssl.so.1.0.2m;
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 16 Nov 13 13:52 /usr/lib64/libssl.so.10 -> libssl.so.1.0.2m
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 448640 Nov 13 13:52 /usr/lib64/libssl.so.1.0.2m

As you can see in the results, the two files that got us interested were in end the same file so we decided to use /usr/lib64/libssl.so.10 whose name was not tight to a minor distribution version of the library and would automatically link to any minor updates in the future.

After examining the Viber installation folder in /opt/viber/, we saw that there was a lib folder there with no SSL libraries available (even though all the QT and networking libraries were there already):

$ ls /opt/viber/lib/
libicudata.so.52 libQt5Gui.so.5 libQt5Qml.so.5 libQt5WebEngine.so.5
libicui18n.so.52 libQt5Location.so.5 libQt5QuickControls2.so.5 libQt5WebEngineWidgets.so.5
libicuuc.so.52 libQt5MultimediaQuick_p.so.5 libQt5Quick.so.5 libQt5WebSockets.so.5
libpng12.so.0 libQt5Multimedia.so.5 libQt5QuickTemplates2.so.5 libQt5Widgets.so.5
libqgsttools_p.so.1 libQt5MultimediaWidgets.so.5 libQt5QuickWidgets.so.5 libQt5XcbQpa.so.5
libqrencode.so libQt5Network.so.5 libQt5Sql.so.5
libQt5Concurrent.so.5 libQt5OpenGL.so.5 libQt5Svg.so.5 libxcb-xinerama.so.0
libQt5Core.so.5 libQt5Positioning.so.5 libQt5WebChannel.so.5
libQt5DBus.so.5 libQt5PrintSupport.so.5 libQt5WebEngineCore.so.5

Examining our OS, we saw that in the rest of the locations were the QT libraries were installed there was a copy of the libssl as well.
So we decided to make a soft symbolic link of the /usr/lib64/libssl.so.10 shared library in the Viber libraries folder.
We did two tests:

  1. Creating a symbolic link named libssl.so.10 failed.
  2. Creating a symbolic link name libssl.so succeeded and solved the issue!

The command that we used was the following:

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sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/libssl.so.10 /opt/viber/lib/libssl.so;

After performing this step, Viber was working again as expected!

$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/libssl.so.10 /opt/viber/lib/libssl.so;
 $ /opt/viber/Viber
 Qt WebEngine ICU data not found at /opt/viber/resources. Trying parent directory...
 Qt WebEngine resources not found at /opt/viber/resources. Trying parent directory...
 Qt WebEngine ICU data not found at /opt/viber/resources. Trying parent directory...
 Qt WebEngine resources not found at /opt/viber/resources. Trying parent directory...
 QQuickItem: Cannot set activeFocusOnTab to false once item is the active focus item.
 QQuickItem: Cannot set activeFocusOnTab to false once item is the active focus item.
 QQuickItem: Cannot set activeFocusOnTab to false once item is the active focus item.
 QQuickItem: Cannot set activeFocusOnTab to false once item is the active focus item.
 QQuickItem: Cannot set activeFocusOnTab to false once item is the active focus item.
 qml: type=""
 qml: type=""
 qrc:/QML/Feed/FeedView.qml:98:5: QML ListViewEx: Binding loop detected for property "bottomMargin"
 QObject: Cannot create children for a parent that is in a different thread.
 (Parent is QObject(0x7f3f5f970520), parent's thread is QThread(0x4191210), current thread is QThread(0x515f5b0)
 Invalid SOS parameters for sequential JPEG

Success!