Solved, FYI: 1.3 linux early crash on startup, no logs produced.

[manaiaK]

I'll just put this here as a record of troubleshooting a problem with KSP 1.3 on Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon 64-bit. I hope it helps someone else, someday...

Hardware: Sandy Bridge i7-2600, 12GB, 1TB, GXT1050 (2GB VRAM).  Shell: Bash.

Process to produce the problem:

$ cd ~/games/ksp_1_3/   # folder to which KSP 1.3 was unzipped.

$ ./KSP.x86_64

Result:

A completely blank/dark grey screen flashes up a couple of times, and then I am returned to the command line. A core dump is produced.

$ echo $?
127
$ find . -type f -name "*.log"
$            #no results.

"127" is the universal "user-defined error" return code. Not much help. Nor is the core dump of much help, without the source code or a binary compiled for debugging. As shown, no log files are produced by KSP.

Solution Steps:

Required packages: strace and mlocate.

$ sudo updatedb

$ strace -s 256 -o strace.log ./KSP.x86_64

As before KSP runs and crashes, but this time a file strace.log is produced. The "-s 256" means record up to 256 bytes of strings in the program, so you can get full file names.

$ less strace.log

Press 'End' to go to the end of the file.  Working backwards from the end of the trace log,  the last significant thing was an error within the file "libkeyboard.so".

$ ls -lh `locate libkeyboard.so`
-rwxr-xr-x 1 manaiaK  users  13K May 26 04:54 /srv/home/manaiaK/games/ksp_1_3/KSP_Data/Plugins/x86_64/libkeyboard.so*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 manaiaK  users 7.7K May 26 04:54 /srv/home/manaiaK/games/ksp_1_3/KSP_Data/Plugins/x86/libkeyboard.so*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   56K Jun 25  2014 /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon-3.0/libkeyboard.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   31K Mar  8  2016 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/cinnamon-settings-daemon-3.0/libkeyboard.so

So, there are different versions of this file.

$ cd KSP_Data/Plugins/x86_64
$ cp libkeyboard.so libkeyboard.so.bak
$ cp /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/cinnamon-settings-daemon-3.0/libkeyboard.so .

$ cd -              # returns to ~games/ksp_1_3
$ strace -s 256 -o strace.log ./KSP.x86_64

KSP runs and crashes as before, but inspecting the strace.log file as before reveals a different problem! Progress!.

This time the problem is with a file liblingoona.grammar.kerbal.so, which is unique to KSP

I downloaded the KSP 1.3.1 pre-release, and sure enough the liblingoona.grammar.kerbal.so file was different.  Copying the 1.3.1 liblingoona in place of the one in my 1.3 install  using the process described above fixed that problem.

After that, KSP ran normally but produced a SIGSEGV and core dump when I quit the game.

To not get core dumps when I run KSP, but still get them when required for debugging my own stuff:-

$ ulimit -c 0 ; ./KSP_x86_64 ; ulimit -c unlimited