Okular can't open files [unless executed from terminal]

[Chopstick]

Hi,

I recently upgraded my laptop and my workstation to 13.04 from 12.10 (64bit), and I'm having an annoying problem on my laptop (but not on my workstation!):

When I try to open a PDF file using Okular from the plasma environment (from krunner, dolphin, kmail, and Firefox), I can't open any files; Okular itself starts up, but whenever I try to open a file, I get the message "Could not open /path/to/file.pdf". However, when I run Okular from the terminal and open a PDF file, it works perfectly fine.

This does not happen on my workstation (although there are other problems), and the Adobe Acrobat Reader works perfectly fine as well. (But I would prefer to use okular.)

I also noticed that Gwenview and VLC have similar problems (i.e. can't open files when called through Plasma, but work fine when run from the terminal); it looks like this might be a general issue (but Gwenview and VLC are not as crucial as Okular).

My uneducated guess is that some backend libraries are not loaded correctly in Plasma, because the environment is not set up correctly.

Any Ideas?

Chopstick

[Teunis]

Have you recently done a full update and upgrade?
You have already tried to reinstall the programs in question?
I'd start by uninstalling including purging Okular and then reinstalling.

[OneLine]

Quick test

I would make a quick test: make a new user - does the new user have the same problem ?

If the new user have the same problem then it is (probably) a installation problem.

If the new user doesn't have the same problem then it is (probably) a user's configuration file problem.

[Chopstick]

Thanks for the replies! I've already tried purging and reinstalling the programs in question and I have also tried removing the configuration files in .kde/ but it all didn't help. I keep getting the same problem.

[OneLine]

User settings

Not all user configuration files are under the hidden kde directory. That is why I suggested the new user test. New user -> clean, new, settings.

Error messages

Have you checked the hidden .xsession-errors file ?

More of the error messages: http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...rom-the-K-menu

[Chopstick]

OK, so I tried the new-user-test: the new user has exactly the same problem; moreover, the new user can't even open PDFs in the terminal. The reason I can open PDFs in the terminal with my regula user is that I source the Intel compiler environments in my .bashrc. If I do that, I can open PDFs in a terminal with the new user as well. But I have no idea why Okular suddenly depends on the Intel compiler (Intel Composer XE 2013), and I also don't understand why this is not the case on my workstation, eventhough I also installed the Intel compiler there.

I guess a quick fix would be to somehow source the Intel environment when KDE is started, but the cleaner solution would be to remove this dependency on Intel... but I don't know how to do either of these...

[Chopstick]

OK, so for now I have created a file intel.conf in /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ where I listed all the Intel library path' and ran ldconfig, and now everything is working...

I'm not sure if I'm really happy with that solution, but at least it works.
Do you have any comments or a better idea?

Thanks for the new-user suggestion OneLine - next time I should try that first!

[Teunis]

Judging by the solution you found a weird problem...
Did you knowingly install the Intel compiler?

[Chopstick]

Yes, I installed the Intel compile myself. I'm using it for development, because that's the compiler we have on our cluster at the University.