Dapper: Add/Remove applications and Update Manager make the system unresponsive
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
gnome-app-install (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
Medium
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
My laptop is an IBM Thinkpad T21 currently running the Dapper Beta. Hardware info: https:/
The Add/Remove Applications app brings the entire system to a halt. The app is very slow to launch and to complete searches, and when installing something (I tested it by installing some life simulator game) the app froze, freezing the entire OS along with it (that is, making the system unresponsive, it still appeared to be working in the background) and making the system unusable, for 45 minutes (no exaggeration) until finally I was able to kill GNOME via CTRL-ALT-BKSPCE.
On the same laptop in Breezy Add Applications did not have this problem.
Details:
The same problem was not found when using Synaptic Package Manager under the same circumstances on the same machine.
I could see the disk activity LED flashing constantly the entire time the system was unresponsive.
When I did the test the laptop wasn't connected to the Internet, so Add Applications could not have succeeded in installing the package I asked for. I just wanted to see what the error message was.
The current state of my root partition is:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 2.9G 2.1G 692M 76% /
so I wonder if the lack of free space was what caused the problem (although I was only asking it to install one small app that it couldn't have downloaded anyway).
I think I saw this same problem with the same system when downloading a big chunk (around 200Mb) of updates earlier using Update Manager - the system was completely frozen for a very long time although I could see there was disk activity. Eventually the update succeeded, but it took far longer than usual. On Breezy on the same machine a large update would not take nearly as long and although it would slow the system down a lot it wouldn't make it completely unresponsive.
Just downloaded another chunk of Dapper updates on this laptop (70Mb this time) and can confirm that update-manager makes the system unresponsive for a long time while the updates are installed. I closed the laptop lid while it was updating, and when opening it I couldn't acitvate the screen again, ubuntu was completely unresponsive. Again the disk activity light was busy the whole time.