Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Latest Ubuntu conkyForecast update fix

(Updated 27 October, added recommended ln command, see below)
Today's update to conkyForecast, the program that enables the current weather conditions and a four-day forecast to be displayed on the screen, came with an unexpected downside. It stopped working. A bit of searching around for others with similar problems prompted me to look at the .xsession-errors file, in my home directory. From there, the message:

/usr/bin/conkyForecast: 3: /usr/bin/python2: not found

kept repeating. Having a look for the file /usr/bin/python2 showed that yes, that file was indeed non-existent. This was puzzling. I opened up the file /usr/bin/conkyForecast, to see where it was mentioned. It is only a short file of a couple of lines, but one of them did call python2. This is a link in the /usr/bin directory, pointing to python2.6.

There are two fixes to this. One, I edited the file /usr/bin/conkyForecast and changed python2 to python. This fixed it - the forecast was displaying on screen again, but further updates to the script would overwrite this, meaning you'd have to do it again. Therefore, I'd recommend the following method.

The other, recommended, way to fix it is to re-create the python2 link in /usr/bin: I just restored it from a backup made a few days ago (Yay for backintime!), but you could just create a link to python2.6 with the ln command, as below:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python2.6 /usr/bin/python2

As an update, a little further searching revealed this post on the Ubuntu forums. This is a known issue with Ubuntu 10.10, where there is no link to python2. ConkyForecast was updated to point to python2, in preparation for later versions of Python.

7 comments:

  1. Thanks for this. Solution #1 worked perfect.

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  2. I changed it from python2 to python and it works great. Not sure either on how or why this happened but thanks for the tip.

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  3. Спасибо !!!!!!!!! Заработало :)

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  4. Option 1 worked like a charm thanks for the tip!

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  5. I guess in my case it has something to do with Weather.com

    ERROR: Unknown option in config file: XOAP_PARTNER_ID
    ERROR: Unknown option in config file: XOAP_LICENCE_KEY
    ERROR: Unknown option in config file: DEFAULT_LOCATION
    ERROR: Server connection error:
    ERROR: Location SWXX0020 is not in cache.
    ERROR: Failed to load the location cache

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  6. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Crestron/messages/147441?threaded=1&m=e&var=1&tidx=1

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  7. Thanks Julio, it looks like using weather.com is out of the question now, unless you want to pay the subscription fees they are asking. I remember getting an email from them a month or two back stating they are moving to this model.

    I haven't used conkyforecast for a while now, so I haven't really been looking into alternatives. The link you provided above could give some answers to others though.

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