Ubuntu: server hangs and doesn't start

I installed supercollider in ubuntu 18.04 and everything was working fine.

All of a sudden, when I try to boot server, I get this on the interpreter:

booting server ‘localhost’ on address: 127.0.0.1:57110
RESULT = 127

And in the status bar: Server 0.00%

The booting hangs there and does nothing else. I have no idea what can be happening :frowning: Any help would be appreciated.

RESULT = 127

… means the server process has either stopped unexpectedly, or couldn’t start.

Troubleshooting steps:

  1. Get the server options: s.options.asOptionsString. Copy from the post window to the clipboard.

  2. In the terminal, type scsynth and paste the options. Run that command. If there’s any new information, paste it into a message here.

  3. If it’s still unclear, install gdb, and do (terminal) gdb scsynth --args + pasted options string. (It might be -args, I forget.) If there are any errors before the (gdb) prompt, paste them here.

    a. Then, at the (gdb) prompt, do run. Any errors, paste them.

    b. If it posts something about an exception or a signal, do where at the gdb prompt and copy/paste the stack trace.

With any luck, this will help explain what’s going on.

hjh

I did as you suggested, and when I typed scsynth in the terminal, it said that the command was not recognized and that I should proceed with “sudo apt install supercollider-server”. Once I did that, the server starts normally.

I don’t understand / don’t remember why or when it stopped working, but anyway it is solved now.

Thank you very much for your help.

Aha… Right, if you ask it to run the scsynth executable but scsynth isn’t present on the system, that won’t be successful.

Glad it’s working.

For a number of complicated reasons, the Ubuntu packaged version of SuperCollider is quite far out of date… and currently the way to update is to build from source. This is actually relatively straightforward (and well documented in README_LINUX.md). If you’re a very new user, you might not need to worry about that just yet – just so that you’re aware there are newer versions available (with some effort).

hjh

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