Burton Software Inspired Innovation™

To ensure that Tesseract works on a variety of platforms, I decided I should use more than just openSuSE to develop on, I should test on the linux platform that will be used the most, so due to its recent rise in popularity I thought of Ubuntu, or more specifically Kubuntu (a personal preference). So I installed Kubuntu on another machine and ran the translucency test GUI. The result?

Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Beta Broken	openSuSE 10.2 Working

Not quite right... This made no sense to me, as the code was completely unchanged, and running the same code in openSuSE had provided the correct output for my last blog post (Tesseract Translucency Test). So, after a quick check of the code to make sure nothing completely insane was going wrong, I decided it must be either a gtk-sharp problem (unlikely) or a cairo problem (much more likely). I reinstalled mono to ensure it wasn't a fault with the mono.cairo bindings, but this had no effect, so I installed a different cairo package (version 1.2.6-1 at the time of writing this). The result? It worked, with the same output openSuSE provided. So, I guess there's either a problem with the ubuntu feisty version of cairo, or the mono.cairo binding is incompatible with the ubuntu feisty cairo version (newer than the above linked one). I am however using Kubuntu feisty, so I guess its to be expected that there will be some problems until the development is complete.

Edit: Of course, that was too simple... Other packages claim to (and probably do) need the newer version of Cairo ubuntu distributes with feisty, hence installing the .deb above made the package manager claim these apps were now broken. The (temporary) solution? Extract libcairo.so.2.9.3 from the deb, rename it to libcairo.so.2 and place it in the same directory as the exe using Tesseract. I assume this is an issue with the Mono.Cairo bindings not being compatible with the new cairo library, in which case it should be resolved without too much hassle.

Edit: This is no longer an issue with the Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) final release.