Troubleshooting

Here you’ll find help with some common problems. If your problem isn’t listed, feel free to file an issue including your error message and the output of python setup.py diagnose. You can also join us on the Shoebot Matrix channel.

Installation issues

Check progress with diagnose

If you’re having trouble with a specific package, Shoebot provides a ‘diagnose’ command to check if things are working: python3 setup.py diagnose

It’s usually easiest to start with Python3 and Pycairo, then move on to PyGobject, Pango and Gtk3.

Try PGI with CairoCFFI and GTK3 instead of PyGobject and Pycairo

Shoebot can run under PGI and CairoCFFI, which may be easier to install than the recommended setup with Pygobject and Pycairo.

In this setup Shoebot can work with the GUI, but text output is not available.

Other problems

TypeError: Couldn’t find foreign struct converter for ‘cairo.Context’

If you see this error, it means you’re missing the Python GObject interface for cairo. On Debian/Ubuntu, this should be fixed with:

sudo apt-get install python3-gi-cairo

See the installation page to know the relevant dependencies in other distros.

The Gedit plugin does not activate

Try running Gedit from the command line so that you can see debug messages. If you see one of these warnings:

** (gedit:3830): WARNING **: Could not load Gedit repository: Typelib file for namespace 'GtkSource', version '3.0' not found

or:

ImportError: cannot import name Gedit

then try installing the gir1.2-gtksource-3.0 package.

This StackOverflow answer helped on finding this solution.