PWS 2.2RC, Kubuntu 6.06 host, can only run parallels as root

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eriqthegeek

Member
I had no problems installing or running parallels-config.

But when I try to run parallels as a normal user, it quickly dies a horrible death with a segmentation fault. I never see a GUI or anything.

But, if I run it as root, it comes up fine. So I guess there must be some permissions problem or something, but I'm not sure what it is. I'd really prefer not to run as root. I had previously installed it on a different machine (running Fedora Core 5) with the trial license and it worked fine as a normal user. Of course, now that I've bought an actual license and am trying to install it on my primary machine it's being a little uncooperative. :)

Any ideas? Log file from bugreports directory attached.

Eric
 

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The host OS is Kubuntu 6.06. I have run the trial version on Fedora Core 5 without issue. I also tried it on an older Ubuntu box still running 5.10, and didn't have problems with it either. The guest OS I'm trying to run is Windows XP, but for this particular issue, that doesn't matter because I can't even get that far. Unless I run as root ... then everything works great!
 
So anybody know anything about libscim?

Just for grins and giggles, I tried renaming the libscim library where it seems to be blowing up, and running again as non-root. Seems to work fine. I thought about just removing this library altogether but when I checked apt-get, there were a lot of dependencies on it (like kubuntu-desktop). Interestingly, the two boxes where I'm not having a problem to not seem to have this library (one is an older Ubuntu, one is Fedora Core, both are running Gnome rather than KDE).

And, I think it's weird that this library only causes a problem if I'm running as a non-root user.

With this additional information, does this problem make more sense to anybody? I'd really like to understand what's going on here.

Thanks,
Eric
 
So ...

... I decided to run parallels through strace and do a comparison between running it as a normal user and running as root. And I found this:

access("/usr/lib/qt3/plugins", F_OK) = 0
access("/usr/lib/qt3/plugins/inputmethods/libqscim.so", F_OK) = 0
rename("/usr/lib/qt3/plugins/inputmethods/libqscim.so", "/usr/lib/qt3/plugins/inputmethods/libqscim.so.old") = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)

Now, when I'm running as root, this operation succeeds, and everything is happy. When I run as a normal user, it fails, since that directory is not writable. This causes parallels to segfault later on.

If I make that directory writable by my regular user ID, TADA, everything works.

But that doesn't seem like something I should have to do. Why would it be renaming this library file? I'm really confused.
 
Was this problem ever resolved? I'm having the same issue with Ubuntu 6.10 "Edgy". Despite the fact of the parallels-linux binary being SUID root, startup fails unless I kick it off as 'sudo parallels' - whereupon it runs just fine.
 
Is everyone with that problem running kubuntu "Edgy"?
I don't recall this same problem when I ran ubuntu "Edgy".
Here it is March 10th and still having the same problem, will only run as root.

vectormax
 
Problem still exists on Feisty. All was fine for me until I added the Kubuntu desktop to my Ubuntu install. Then I couldn't run Parallels as a regular user, but could as root or through sudo. I added write permissions to /usr/lib/qt3/plugins/inputmethods/ and all was well.

It's silly that needs to be done and disgraceful that the developers still haven't done anything about this.
 
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