After a recent update to mendeleydesktop 1.8, I got some annoying error messages:
$ mendeleydesktop Using bundled Qt version 4.6 because no system Qt version was found Running /opt/mendeleydesktop/bin/..//lib/mendeleydesktop/libexec/mendeleydesktop.i486 /opt/mendeleydesktop/bin/..//lib/mendeleydesktop/libexec/mendeleydesktop.i486: error while loading shared libraries: libpulse.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
If you see this error, you most likely have not installed pulseaudio. I’m not quite sure why viewing PDF annotations requires pulseaudio, but nevertheless, you should refrain from installing everything from pulseaudio if you do not plan to actually use it. Here is how to restrict the USE-flags to a reasonable set
# echo 'media-sound/pulseaudio -X -alsa -asyncns -caps -dbus -gdbm glib -gtk -ipv6 -orc -ssl -tcpd -udev -webrtc-aec' >> /etc/portage/package.use # emerge -av media-sound/pulseaudio
But that would have been too easy. Unfortunately, Qt is not forward compatible (surprise!). Currently, I have version 1.8.2 on my machine, but this version does not go well with the build from mendeley. You can fix this by prepend LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or add a bash alias for that to your bashrc in your home).
$ mendeleydesktop Using bundled Qt version 4.6 because no system Qt version was found Running /opt/mendeleydesktop/bin/..//lib/mendeleydesktop/libexec/mendeleydesktop.i486 /opt/mendeleydesktop/bin/..//lib/mendeleydesktop/libexec/mendeleydesktop.i486: error while loading shared libraries: libpulse.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory $ LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/mendeleydesktop/lib/" /opt/mendeleydesktop/bin/..//lib/mendeleydesktop/libexec/mendeleydesktop.i486