The mysterious evince

evince, otherwise known as "Document Viewer", is a pretty much standard feature of many a Linux distribution. So there I was, trying to use it on a mostly up-to-date Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit machine and I kept getting messages that looked like the following:

(evince:5691): EggSMClient-WARNING **: Failed to connect to the session manager: Authentication Rejected, reason : None of the authentication protocols specified are supported and host-based authentication failed

There were other messages as well, some stated that evince could not open the display(???) even though other X-applications, such as xterm, for instance, would run just fine from the same command line.

To make things even more bizarre that would happen for some users on the machine and not others. Attempts to play with Gnome settings - or even evince-specific settings - such as deleting ~/.gnome2 directory or specifically ~/.gnome2/evince subdirectory - appeared to be making no difference.

After some web searches I found a solution that seems to work. Hat tip to the participants of this discussion on the Ubuntu Forums. The following seemed to actually fix the problem for everybody:

sudo bash
cd /usr/bin
mv evince evince.bin
ln -s evince.bin evince

And don't ask me why!