Psychopy 2024.2.0 on Debian 12 crashes before displaying application windows

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1

I know this is a longshot, but on the off chance that someone else has run into this. I have a clean install of Debian 12. I followed the Linux installation instructions and used https://raw.githubusercontent.com/psychopy/psychopy/dev/installPsychoPy.py to install. When I switch to the python3.10 venv and run psychopy it can show me the tool tips window, the changelog window, and (on first execution) the usermod/nice level settings window then it crashes.

I’ve tried deleting the ~/.psychopy3/ directory just in case it was some lingering problem.

I’ve verified that wxPython minimally works by writing a hello world test from inside the psychopy virtual environemnt. I can also load the various psychopy libraries in the interactive python interpreter.

When I run strace (happy to share the output if someone would find it helpful) the last open() call was to libogg.so.0 and this appears to have succeeded. The process then does a number of reads and writes successfully before segfaulting. I don’t understand the dependencies well enough yet to figure out where libogg got called, but I have libogg0 version 1.3.5-3 installed from Debian stable. Just for giggles I tried it with Wayland instead of Xorg (because there were some xauth erros in the initial strace output under Xorg) but this appears to change nothing about the segfault.

Can anyone recommend additional debugging steps or a possible solution? I won’t be able to work on this again for a couple of days, but my next step is going to be to grab 2024.2.1 from the github release branch and try that.

2

I installed 2024.2.1 today on Debian-12 Bookworm with the bare pip install method inside a conda env with just python 3.10.15 and recent libstdcxx-ng

Prerequisites were:

  • apt-get install libwebkit2gtk-4.1*
  • apt-get install libwxgtk-webview3.2-dev

then

  • pip install psychopy
  • pip install PyGObject # solving "The GTK4 backends require PyGObject below"

and that worked well after changing matplotlib.use('gtk4agg') in timeByFrames.py from demos/timing.

Good luck!

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Thank you! Your reply set me on the right path. Just installing these dependencies didn’t help with my particular problem, but you did inspire me to delete my venv and start over with a bare pip install. Here’s what got me up and running on Debian 12:

  1. compile python3.10.15 from source and altinstall into /usr/local
  2. /usr/local/bin/python3.10 -m venv ~/.psychopy_py310
  3. source ~/.psychopy_py310/bin/activate
  4. pip install psychopy

and voila! I have a working PsychoPy 2024.2.1 in a venv on Debian 12! I can’t launch with --builder for some reason, but that’s easy enough to deal with.

thank you!

4

Might be fixed by BF: Handle when record of last open app windows is an invalid value (e.g. from old version) by TEParsons · Pull Request #6885 · psychopy/psychopy · GitHub, which is on the release branch now?

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(funny, kind of) Today on a different computer, my own instructions did not succeed.
Debian-12, Python3.10.15 from conda, prereq as above, everything installed by just pip, building very long for the wheels. Psychopy is version 2024.2.1
But then, same behaviour as @kbmcgowan 's initial description, no builder-, coder-, runner-windows open.

Solution (following a hint from Jon for Mac here : kill the hourglass with Ctrl-C, change lastFrame to “coder” in ~/.psychopy3/appData.cfg (deleting the tree did not help). Then psychopy did show the coder window, and switching windows worked.

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Thanks for the update @uliw
I had heard suggestion that recent releases failed to launch on linux except if you ran an older version first and I think this looks like the cause of that. There was a refactoring of the logic around reopening previous windows (so that specific windows could be requested) and I think this got broken at that point. We’ve just released 2024.2.4 where that issue should now be fixed

7

Thanks @Jon! I can confirm that an pip install psychopy -U to 2024.2.4 solves the issue with the not opening windows at my computer (Debian 12).