[PLUG] XaraLX no longer runs

[John Jason Jordan]

Although I do not use it often, I have long had the free XraLX graphics
application installed, currently on Xubuntu 13.10, x86_64. While trying
to figure out if I could come up with a solution for Chuck Hast's
multipage tiff problem I tried to launch it, and got nada. From the
command line I get the following undecipherable error message:

	xaralx: relocation error: xaralx: symbol
	_ZTV19wxGnomePrintFactory, version WXU_2.8 not defined in file
	libwx_gtk2u_core-2.8.so.0 with link time reference

For those not familiar with XaraLX I should give a little history. Way,
way back in the early days of desktop publishing on PCs the leading
graphics applications were CorelDRAW (for vector files on a PC), Adobe
Illustrator (for vector files on a Mac, and later a PC) and Photoshop
(for bitmaps on both platforms). CorelDRAW was Windows only, and
actually started in the days of Windows 2.0, if anyone can remember
that far back.

CorelDRAW always had issues, mainly because founder Michael Cowpland
was a genius at designing user interfaces, much less so at running a
business, and he totally sucked at writing code or managing staff who
could do so. Corel was famous buggy code. 

A couple years or so before Cowpland gave up trying to run Corel
Corporation and sold everything to a private investment company, the
upstart competitor Xara (different versions known as XaraLX and Xara
Xtreme) was launched. Xara promised to offer every feature that
CoreDRAW had, plus it would be vastly cheaper, and (hopefully)
relatively bug-free, as well as lighter and faster. At the time the
Windows DTP community was abuzz with the possibility.

During the days of Breezy Badger Xara released a free Linux version, as
well as the source code.

http://www.xaraxtreme.org/download.html

Sadly, little has been done with it since then, although it's still
available. Indeed, it is in Ubuntu's repos, which is how I installed
it. At the above link there is also a package that you can download and
just run without using apt. It also says that it is 32-bit, but can be
compiled for 64-bit architecture. 

At this point the easiest solution would probably be to decipher the
above error message and solve whatever problem is causing it. Failing
that, perhaps I should attempt to compile it from the source. If anyone
has any idea what the above error message means, I could use some
suggestions.

And Chuck, if you're listening, I'm pretty sure Xara can open
(although not edit) tiff files, so if you can get it to run you might
give it a shot at your problem.