It’s something weird, but from last week :observer.start is not working in my machine. This is the error that I’m receiving:
Erlang/OTP 20 [RELEASE CANDIDATE 2] [erts-9.0] [source] [64-bit] [smp:4:4] [ds:4:4:10] [async-threads:10] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false]
Interactive Elixir (1.4.4) - press Ctrl+C to exit (type h() ENTER for help)
iex(1)> :observer.start
21:52:25.399 [error] WX Failed loading 'wxe_driver'@'/usr/lib/erlang/lib/wx-1.8.1/priv'
{:error,
{{:load_driver,
'symbol _ZThn704_N17wxGenericListCtrl31GetSizeAvailableForScrollTargetERK6wxSize, version WXU_3.0 not defined in file libwx_gtk2u_core-3.0.so.0 with link time reference'},
[{:wxe_server, :start, 1, [file: 'wxe_server.erl', line: 65]},
{:wx, :new, 1, [file: 'wx.erl', line: 115]},
{:observer_wx, :init, 1, [file: 'observer_wx.erl', line: 98]},
{:wx_object, :init_it, 6, [file: 'wx_object.erl', line: 372]},
{:proc_lib, :init_p_do_apply, 3, [file: 'proc_lib.erl', line: 247]}]}}
I have tried to remove Erlang/Elixir and install it again, but without results. Indeed there are some weird things. For example, Erlang Solutions repository is installing a RC Version of esl-erlang and I don’t know why.
I have faced the same problem.
It turns out that there are different releases of Erlang, and both the one that comes standard with Canonical’s package repository as well as the one that asdf provides are missing certain natively-compiled modules, including the ones that are required to run WX (the GUI toolkit that :observer uses).
The esl-erlang version contains (many of?) these optional parts. Installing Erlang from esl-erlang after adding the PPA of Erlang Solutions (see this page) solved it for me.
For posterity: The maintainer of asdf-erlangreplied to the issue I made on that source repository. It turns out that you can install the required files for WX manually, and if you do that before installing erlang through ASDF, then everything will work as intended.
It’s not working for me. I’m not using ASDF but if I run xw-config --version it seems to be already installed (it says I have 3.0.2 version). My Erlang version is esl-erlang too, but :observer.start throws the error of my first message.
This happened to me as well. I also had trouble with Tesla (using hackney) making api requests. The Erlang Solutions repo is now installing esl-erlang 1:20.0-rc2.
Once I rolled back to esl-erlang 1:19.3 Tesla & :observer started working again. You’ll need to pin the package in apt to prevent updating.
For what little time I had it running 20.0-rc2 did seem to feel a little faster.
Many thanks, @l00ker that worked for me too. Curiously I have installed 1.9.3.6 at first, but it doesn’t work either. After that, I have downgraded the package one more time, to version 1.9.3, and now it’s working.
I am also running Linux Mint 18.1 Serena, and I have been able to get Erlang/OTP 19 with :observer-support installed using the ASDF version manager, by following the ‘before install’ steps here, so maybe that helps