Octave exited with signal 6 On Startup

[Thomas A. F. Thorne]

Before my update to Ubuntu 18.04 I was using Octave under 16.04. I am not a frequent Octave user (once every few months). I updated to 18.04 a couple of months ago and tried running octave today only to find that it would not start from my command line. Instead, I see:

$ octave
octave exited with signal 6

A quick internet search suggested a couple of options but nothing that is obviously this problem. Filing an Ubuntu bug as it happened on Ubuntu and it might have been brought about by the upgrade between LTS releases.

+bug 1156575 was suggested as a possible duplicate but that is quite old and not what I think I am seeing.

Somewhere on a search result, it was suggested I run an strace with octave. I have attached the output of `$ strace octave > ~/octave-strace.log 2>&1` as octave-strace.log

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: octave 4.2.2-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-33.36-generic 4.15.18
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-33-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.3
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Fri Sep 7 10:25:39 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-11-16 (294 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20170801)
SourcePackage: octave
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to bionic on 2018-07-27 (41 days ago)

[Thomas A. F. Thorne (tafthorne)]

Further diagnostic suggestions were to try:

$ octave --norc
octave exited with signal 6

$ octave --no-gui-libs
GNU Octave, version 4.2.2

$ octave-cli
GNU Octave, version 4.2.2

So the problem seems to be related to the GUI libraries for me. I am not much help at diagnosing more than that. I am happy to try running any commands people thing would help lead to a diagnosis. The problem seems to be very repeatable for me at present.

[Thomas A. F. Thorne (tafthorne)]

I got another automated crash prompt to come up. This generated +bug1791278 (which is marked as private right now, but I shall try to change that when appropriate).

I had tried running octave as root to see if that changed the unavailable resource mentions in the strace. I now see SIGABRT in QMessageLogger::fatal() in the messages, which could fit with the GUI work.