8.10 Upgrade Stops Applications from Running

I had a happily working G3 iMac using 8.4 LTS. I upgraded to 8.10 and the system seemed to come up, but with the following behavior; most applications attempt to load but close immediately. For instance if I start firefox from an xterm, after a few seconds it exits with the message 'Illegal Instruction'.

When I login using failsafe terminal sesssion, I can run firefox with no problem.

This behavior extends to most, but not all applications on the standard menus. For instance the file manager and stickies work fine, but the calculator or terminal application do not work. If I run xterm, xeyes, xlogo, etc. these work fine. Emacs works fine.

Has anyone else seen this when upgrading to 8.10? Is there something about running an application in gnome that is different that in X without a window manager (as in the failsafe terminal)?

Thank you for any ideas.

Angus

Hi Angus. Check here. [COLOR="Red"]http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=961107&highlight=Gnome+launch+apps.&page=2[/COLOR]

Same problem here with a G3 clamshell iBook.

The solution: wget http://ubuntuforums.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=90789&d=1225648179 sudo dpkg -i libpixman-1-0_0.12.0-1_powerpc.deb

...and never allow that package to be updated again.

This had been my temporary fix: switch to tty1 ctrl + alt (option) + f1

export DISPLAY=":0.0" gnome-terminal > /dev/null &

and switch back to tty7 where X lives ctrl + alt (option) + f7

And I just run every app from the command line that way.