"exec: error -5" with julia from ubuntu PPA

[Heliosmaster]

Hello,
I am using Ubuntu 12.04 and I installed Julia using the ppa repositories as suggested in the website.

Unfortunately, I am unable to even try it.

$ julia
fatal: error thrown and no exception handler available.
ErrorException("exec: error -5")

[pao]

cc @staticfloat

[pao]

@Heliosmaster since the PPA builds are frequent, can you give the output of aptitude show julia | grep Version?

[pao]

Or maybe better, all of aptitude show julia and uname -a.

[ghost]

I experience the same problem, even after having just updated from the ppa.

Output of uname -a:
Linux 3.2.0-53-generic #81-Ubuntu SMP Thu Aug 22 21:01:03 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Partial output of aptitude show julia:
Package: julia
New: yes
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Version: 0.2.0+nightly20130910ubuntu12.04.1
Priority: extra
Section: science
Maintainer: Debian Julia Team pkg-julia-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
Architecture: amd64
Uncompressed Size: 35.3 M
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.15), libdouble-conversion0, libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1), libgfortran3 (>=
4.6), libreadline6 (>= 6.0), libstdc++6 (>= 4.6), libunwind7, libopenblas-base |
libblas3 | libatlas3-base, liblapack3 | libatlas3-base, libpcre3, libfftw3-3,
libcholmod1.7.1, libumfpack5.4.0, libgmp10, zlib1g, libarpack2, libopenlibm-base,
librmath-dev, libmpfr4
PreDepends: multiarch-support
Recommends: git
Suggests: ess (>= 12.09-1)
Conflicts: julia

[mlubin]

I can't comment on the ppa issues, but it might be worth a try building from source (https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia#source-download-and-compilation).

[Heliosmaster]

My nightly version is 0.2.0+nightly20130910~ubuntu12.04.1

3.2.0-53-generic #81-Ubuntu SMP Thu Aug 22 21:01:03 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[nljones]

I get the same message. I am running Windows 7. When I run test-julia.bat from the latest download (julia-0.2pre-dca8d76c37-win64) I get the following message:

fatal: error thrown and no exception handler available. Press any key to continue . . .

Oddly, the same installation worked fine on my other Windows 7 machine.

[JeffBezanson]

Looks similar to #1732.

[Heliosmaster]

@mlubin compiling from source works fine (it takes longer than I expected, though)

[staticfloat]

Can you try strace julia, and print out what it says?

[ghost]

Compiled from source and used strace julia to figure out that my libpcre3 version was the problem.
I had 8.12-4 (from 12.04 repository), which seems to cause the startup error. After upgrading to 8.31-2 (from ppa:staticfloat/julia-deps) startup is successful :)

[JeffBezanson]

Glad to hear it.

[mlubin]

Should the ppa be fixed to have an explicit dependency on the libpcre3 version?

[ViralBShah]

Pcre had caused far too many issues. We should probably depend on the exact version we need.

[StefanKarpinski]

I would also like to replace PCRE altogether, but that's a very non-trivial project.

[pao]

Indeed. RE2 doesn't do as much, but there's a crashy and outdated attempt at a Julia wrapper at https://github.com/pao/Re2.jl that anyone is welcome to pick up and run with.

[staticfloat]

Thanks @mlubin, fixed in staticfloat/julia-debian@a10df70