panel reports an error but no details

[Bogdan Butnaru]

Binary package hint: gnome-panel

Hello! I recently upgraded to Lucid, and I started having this bug.

When I log-in, every time, I receive two identical error dialogs. They have, in bold, “The panel encountered a problem while loading "OAFIID:GNOME_KeyboardApplet".”, and in normal text “Do you want to delete the applet from your configuration”. There are only two buttons, marked “Don't Delete” and “Delete”.

I've no idea why there are two dialogs, AFAIK I've only a single keyboard applet on my panel.

The bug, as I see it, is not so much that the error appears, but that there's no visible way to track down what actually happened. If I don't delete the applet, it's still there in the panel, and it appears to work more or less correctly.

(I believe the error is caused by the fact that I'm using a non-standard (home-made) keyboard layout. The applet doesn't display anything when I'm using it, although it displays the country name for other layouts. However, despite the error messages and the lack of a visible name, my layout seems to work correctly.)

Again, this bug report is not about the fact that the error happens, but that the error dialogs don't present any way of tracking down the problem, only to make it go away by removing the applet.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Mar 2 14:00:23 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: gnome-panel 1:2.29.91-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-14.20-generic
SourcePackage: gnome-panel
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-14-generic x86_64

[Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb)]

After a bit of googling, I ended up looking in ~/.xsession-errors. I found the following lines, but they're not much more edifying, which is probably part of the bug:

** (gnome-panel:3373): WARNING **: panel-applet-frame.c:1273: failed to load applet OAFIID:GNOME_KeyboardApplet:
(null)

** (gnome-panel:3373): WARNING **: panel-applet-frame.c:1273: failed to load applet OAFIID:GNOME_KeyboardApplet:
(null)

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

This bug is an upstream one and it would be quite helpful if somebody experiencing it could send the bug the to the people writing the software. You can learn more about how to do this for various upstreams at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream. Thanks in advance!

[Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb)]

OK, I reported it upstream. Anything else I can do?

[Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb)]

By the way, despite the way I formulated this bug, I actually want to find out why the keyboard applet doesn’t like my layout and make the error go away. If anyone has any suggestions for tracking it down myself, please say so :-)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for sending the bug to GNOME

[iheartubuntu (iheartubuntu)]

Im having these applet errors as well. In my case, it is various panel apps, not just specifically the keyboard app.