eog does not recognize .png file format and many icons are gone

I use Ubuntu 12.04 and XFCE desktop on a PC with nVidia graphics card. I ran into Segmentation fault during a Ubuntu update process. An very inconvenient consequence is that .png files cannot be recognized any more thus many programs cannot be started (e.g. gnome-commander, stardict). Also many icons are missing, as well as the min/max/close button icons. I tried open .png using eog and got "unrecognized image file format". I tried reinstall libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 and librsvg and always got segmentation fault.

...
Setting up libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (2.26.1-1) ...
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Setting up libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:i386 (2.26.1-1) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place

running gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders brings up segfaults as well (but not gdk-pixbuf-pixdata or gdk-pixbuf-csource):

>gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders --update-cache
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

I tried logging into gnome and saw the same effect. I tried downloading libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 package file .deb and installing from command line and got segfaults, too. Any suggestions on how to fix it?

Update: I carefully checked all the dependencies' versions in the precise-update database and none of them have problems.

3 Answers

After a lot of Googling and Binging I finally found a solution for me. I'm running BackBox 4.4 which is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on an x86_64 machine but I had this same problem where xfce starts and works normally but images, the menus and icons were not loading. So my desktop background was blank and most icons were missing in the menu. However I remember having this same error during an "apt-get upgrade" as mentioned above. In short here was my fix:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0
sudo dpkg-reconfigure libglib-2.0-0

Then logout and log in and voila! (no restart required).

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. Other posts out there have not looked into that.

Since my yesterday post, I cannot comment on your other question, but here is my answer on launchpad :

Yeah I have recovered my laptop ! (well an expert of my company did so)

I don't know how this is related but here are his steps :

• removed a ppa that I previously added (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/webupd8team-gvfs-libmtp-precise.list)
• reinstalled a few corresponding packages (gvfs, libglib2.0-0)
• reconfigure libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0

It seems libglib2.0-0 was causing the problem. I don't know if this will be okay for most people, but it should help at least debug :-)

Remove the ppa: sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/webupd8team-gvfs-libmtp-precise.list

Then: sudo apt-get update

After that force uninstall of the libglib library with:

sudo dpkg -P --force-all --force-remove-reinstreq libglib2.0-0

You can then reinstall it from the regular ubuntu ppas: sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-0

Finally you need to downgrade glib-networking-common and gvfs-common:

sudo apt-get install glib-networking-common=2.32.1-1ubuntu2
sudo apt-get install gvfs-common=1.12.1-0ubuntu1.2ppa8~precise3

Libraries version should be:

libglib2.0-0: 2.32.4-0ubuntu

gvfs-common: 1.12.1-0ubuntu

libgdk-pixbuf2: 2.26.1-1

But apparently you already have all the correct library versions, that is really weird..