[Linphone-users] Linphone Web plugin for Firefox is built for specific shared library version libpolarssl.so.0

[J G Miller]

At 09:01h, on Sunday, May 31, 2015,
in message <address@hidden>,
on the subject of "Re: [Linphone-users] Linphone Web install difficulty",
Joseph Jameson wrote:

 > G'day JG,
 > I can't do much more that explain the steps I use to install Linphone Web.  

Maybe you cannot do more, but that is the absolute minimum which is needed.

 > 1/ Go to Linphone.org
 > 2/ Under the heading "Technical Corner" click Linphone Web in the drop
 > down.
 > 3/ Wait while "Chargment Loading" 
 > 4/ Click "Allow" in the Firefox popup
 > 5/ Click "Install Now" in the Install only Trusted Authors box.
 > 6/ click "Restart Now" so the addon will install on next Firefox start.
 > 7/ I am presented with a Welcome message that also says "The Pluin is
 > not installed please wait and accept the Automatic install of the
 > plugin"
 > 8/ Click Firefox allow and so the process could go on ad infinitum .  

Good - this is exactly what you need to report.

What you have not stated though is, which Linux Distribution you are using,
which version of Firefox, and the rather awkward one -- which Firefox 
addons/plugins
you have installed.  Sometimes some Firefox addons/plugins have a bad affect on
each other and stops them from working.  Also, doing in "in place" upgrade of
Firefox with various plugins installed can also cause some loss of basic 
functionality
as I recently discovered and had to start with a fresh profile and then add 
everything
back again.

So when you are in any doubt as to whether or not a plugin or addon works, you 
should
use a fresh profile or even better to avoid any possibility of losing your 
profile with
all your plugins due to deleting the wrong one after testing, is to have a test 
user
account eg joe2 with a clean ~joe2/.mozilla directory on startu

 > Have you installed Linphone Web on a 32 bit PC, if so how did you do it?  

Well when I was doing my first attempt at replying to your message, I had not,
and then tried to install as a different user, but my display and keyboard 
locked up
due to a recurring Radeon Xserver bug (usually accompanied by lots of EQ 
overflowing 
messages in the Xorg.log).

Today I have tried again and have a number of issues to mention.

First of all, when you download Firefox addons/plugins in general, the file gets
downloaded to a temporary directory, usually /tmp or one pointed to if the 
TMPDIR
variable is set to point to somewhere else.  I have it set to /var/tmp/${USER}
because /tmp is a small tmpfs and of course it is essential that the size of the
file system is large enough to hold the downloaded file.  So make sure your
/tmp or ${TMPDIR} is large enough to hold the download.

Now when doing the test installation, instead of starting firefox from the menu,
fire up  a terminal and launch firefox from the command line prompt.

This way you will be able to see error/warning messages which otherwise just
get sent to /dev/null and thus have some diagnostics of what may be going wrong.

By doing this, I have found that the reason I am unable to get the LinphoneWeb
addon working (goes into the endless cycle of "plugin not installed, download,
allow installation, restart that you have experienced) is all because when
the plugin, which is in fact downloaded and installed, gets called, it cannot
run.

Thus the web page therefore wrongly concludes that it is not installed.

And the reason for this sad state of affairs is all because as the error message
in the terminal reveals

  LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library
  /home/users/testuser/.mozilla/firefox/1hy1uwwx.default/extensions/
   {A7F0040E-4481-4C03-952F-D8491E5036A7}/plugins/nplinphone-web-1.0.14.so
  [libpolarssl.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory]

namely  libpolarssl.so.0  is NOT found on the system

(Now you see why you need to run Firefox from the command line in order to
be able to see these all important diagnostic error messages.)

What is installed (Linux Mint 17.1 32 bit) however is /usr/lib/libpolarssl.so.5

   ii  libpolarssl5  1.3.4-1  i386  lightweight crypto and SSL/TLS library

So why the plugin is built to look specifically for the version libpolarssl.so.0
and not the "generic" libpolarssl.so which will point to installed version
libpolarssl.so.5 or whichever version of the shared library is installed,
I do not know and only the Linphone developers can answer that and address the 
issue.

One could do something which is extremely bad, dirty, and nasty hack and may
not work at all, and should only be done as an intermediate measure with the
understanding that it may kill all of the kittens in your neighborhood, and
promise to remove it as soon as possible, is as root do

         cd /usr/lib

         ln -s libpolarssl.so  libpolarssl.so.0

Then test in Firefox to see if the plugin works (restart Firefox and reload the
Linphone web page) but it probably will not and may do something bad ...

Actually it does appear to work to get the plugin recognized as installed and 
the
Linphone login page then appears but I have not tried any further than that.

BUT this is not a "fix".

This is an abominable "emergency" hack which must be removed as soon as 
possible,
similar to using horse dung to spread on an infected wound as a last resort to 
try
and kill the infection because there are no anitbiotics available until the 
plane
arrives in a weeks time with fresh supplies from the pharmacy.

So a response from the Linphone Developers Team is needed to put things in 
order ...