nautilus crashed with SIGSEGV when turning off show_desktop

[marmuta]

Binary package hint: nautilus

All I did was turning off /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop. Then the taskbar filled up with failed attempts to start nautilus (see screenshot) with 100% cpu, It worked no problem just yesterday, now it does this on my jaunty install as well as on the live cd. Everything is normal when at least one nautilus file browser is already open before.

ProblemType: Crash
Architecture: amd64
Disassembly: 0x7f7f5fc4eeba:
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/nautilus
Package: nautilus 1:2.25.4-0ubuntu1
ProcCmdline: nautilus
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
Signal: 11
SourcePackage: nautilus
StacktraceTop:
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Title: nautilus crashed with SIGSEGV
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-6-generic x86_64
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout lpadmin plugdev sambashare

[Apport retracing service (apport)]

StacktraceTop:?? ()
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[Apport retracing service (apport)]

Thank you for your report!

However, processing it in order to get sufficient information for the
developers failed (it does not generate an useful symbolic stack trace). This
might be caused by some outdated packages which were installed on your system
at the time of the report:

scrollkeeper: installed version None, latest version: 0.3.14-16ubuntu1
ttf-dejavu: installed version None, latest version: 2.25-3
python-apt: installed version 0.7.9~exp2ubuntu5, latest version: 0.7.7.1ubuntu4

Please upgrade your system to the latest package versions. If you still
encounter the crash, please file a new report.

Thank you for your understanding, and sorry for the inconvenience!

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

there is a new nautilus version in jaunty now

[nyarnon (cabal)]

Great to know but it would have been nice to know what version that would be I'm running Nautilus 2.25.4 and it still shows the formentioned behaviour. It will respawn endlessly ans soon as you flip the switch.

[marmuta (marmuta)]

I have run apport-retrace locally now with the crash file of this report. With all dependent *.dgbsym packages installed the backtrace still looked as useless as the one I reported first. The system was always freshly updated from the main repos too, so it seems unlikely that any new report from apport would improve the situation.

I'll change the state back to new to get this bug out of stealth mode. Feel free to invalidate again if there is something wrong with that.

[nyarnon (cabal)]

I dont think a trace will be of any help. I guess it just shows you running out of memory. Takes a long time on my system to do so 2gig :-) If before that, I set showdesktop to true, the triggered instances fade out en sytem will return to normal state. As the commandline issued by gnome-session is just a clean /usr/bin/nautilus and issueing that from the commandline gives no problem at all one might wonder what's going on? I also notice gnome-session spawning new instances before the old ones close thus it seems there is some problem with the feedback in the startproces? Maybe some permission problem with gnome-session?

[jaapaap (f-nietsje)]

Happens to me after running updates today. Many 'Starting file manager' tab on taskbar. However, switching 'Show Desktop' to off does not seem to change anything.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please try to obtain a backtrace following the instructions at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash and upload the backtrace (as an attachment) to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

[jaapaap (f-nietsje)]

I fixed it by hitting escape in Grub, booting in recov mode, and selecting the 'Try to auto fix graphical problems' option from the recov menu. Which prob means that I can no longer obtain a useful backtrace. Sorry about that.

[marmuta (marmuta)]

I'm trying to get something useful. It's kind of hard to track down because I can't reproduce the crash interactively. So far I got some automated backtraces, but all without symbols for the relevant parts.

Fwiw, the one workaround I found was that I can stop gnome-session from respawning nautilus by setting X-GNOME-AutoRestart=false in /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop.

[marmuta (marmuta)]

Being ready to throw gdb, valgrind and ltrace at the crash again, I found that it doesn't happen anymore :). Todays updates must have fixed it. Nautilus is still spawning though, faster even than before, but I guess this is now
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/328341

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand my attempts to get a good backtrace have been futile anyway because the whole trace looks invalid. None of its addresses even lie in executable memory. I guess no amount of debug symbols could have fixed that.

[nyarnon (cabal)]

Nice workaround Marmuta, works like a charm, Jaunty is starting to become fun again I realy hate it that gnome doesn't support more then 1 wallpaper.

[Dara Adib (daradib)]

I'm marking this bug as a duplicate of Bug 325973 because the crashes no longer occur but nautilus keeps spawning. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide. Any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Otherwise, you can unmark this bug report as a duplicate and close it.