Quoting "Robert C. Smith" <rcsthrax@...289...>:
"One or more extensions failed to load The failed extensions have been skipped. Inkscape will continue to run normally but those extensions will be unavailable."
Wayne...I plan to run dual-boot but had problems loading Mandrake which I am investigating. The above shows that the Windows load of Inkscape HAS PROBLEMS and that this isn't just an open-source distribution issue. I would appreciate that this fact be recognized as discussion proceeds. I am new to open-source except for the Gimp. What is an "extension?" What are the implications of lacking an extension? What is new in .41 which would provoke this error message? (The situation is independent of service packs.) ....RCs
Extensions add support for things additional types of files (e.g. EPS or Adobe Illustrator files). Many of them aren't actually available under Windows yet -- hence the message.
Many extensions depend on additional software being installed to be useful, so if that software isn't installed the extension won't load and you'll see the same message under Unix too. That just means that the extension isn't loaded, though; Inkscape itself is working fine.
This happened with (recent) previous versions of Inkscape too, but until 0.41 it never displayed a message about it. It does seem to me that the wording of the message is less than helpful.
Now, the problems with Inkscape autopackages crashing on startup on some Linux distributions are real, but they're not related to extensions at all.
As far as I can tell they're the result of a known (if obnoxious) gcc issue, where things don't work if a different version of gcc is used to build the autopackage versus the one that was originally used to build some of the libraries installed with the system.
-mental