Arch Linux

Unable to reproduce.
glew 1.7.0-1
projectm 2.0.1-3
projectm-pulseaudio 2.0.1-3

x86_64
kernel 3.2.1

Does applications like "glxgears" work for you?

Yes, OpenGL Apps work fine on my computer. I think the problem is, that projectm is somehow hardlinked to libGLEW.so.1.5. I have libGLEW.so.1.7 installed so there is no such file. If I place a symlink from libGLEW.so.1.5 to libGLEW.so.1.7 projectm works.

So this is a packaging / compiling problem, I think.

I don't have any /usr/lib/libGLEW.so.1.5, only /usr/lib/libGLEW.so.1.7, so how can one explain that it works here?

Have you tried completely uninstalling projectm, double-checking that there are no projectm-related files left and then reinstalling it?

That is the problem, there is no /usr/lib/libGLEW.so.1.5 since the current version of glew in the arch repos is 1.7.0-1.

Doing
pacman -R projectm libvisual-projectm
pacman -S projectm

still leads to the same result:
$ ./projectM-pulseaudio
projectM-pulseaudio: error while loading shared libraries: libGLEW.so.1.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

since there is no libGLEW 1.5 anymore. But it seems to work if you manually create a symlink from 1.5 -> 1.7.

What does this command give on your installation?
readelf -d /usr/bin/projectM-pulseaudio | grep GLEW

Here, the output is:
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libGLEW.so.1.7]

No trace of libGLEW.so.1.5.

Also, what's the md5sum of /usr/bin/projectM-pulseaudio? Here it's: f6b5eb2413303c58f164c49521d32085

Do you use an outdated mirror?

$ readelf -d /usr/bin/projectM-pulseaudio | grep GLEW
0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED) Shared library: [libGLEW.so.1.5]

$ md5sum /usr/bin/projectM-pulseaudio
3d347daaaabb52f62448e306de9c60c8 /usr/bin/projectM-pulseaudio

Interesting fact:
$ pacman -Qo /usr/bin/projectM-pulseaudio
error: No package owns /usr/bin/projectM-pulseaudio

The projectM-pulseaudio binary is not part of the projectm package? -> http://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/projectm/
Has the binary formerly been part of the package in some earlier versions?

If I have an outdated project-pulseaudio binary which is not updated by the projectm package this would totally explain my problems :)

You're probably using the projectM-pulseaudio frontend from the projectm-pulseaudio AUR package [1]. This is (almost) totally unrelated to projectm.

Not sure why "/usr/bin/projectM-pulseaudio" isn't tracked by pacman, though. You might have compiled and installed that manually or you told pacman to do something fancy :) However, rebuilding and reinstalling projectm-pulseaudio should fix your issue :)

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=17714

Thanks that helped ... though I don't remember compiling and installing projectm-pulseaudio myself... maybe there was a system crash causing inconsistencies with the pacman database or something like that :)