SSH results in "There was an error creating the child process for this terminal"

[Piotr Szczepanik]

Jaunty alpha with 0.8.0.1 Do and 0.8.0.2 plugins

When I try to connect to ssh servers using mentioned above version of Gnome Do it opens terminal, but terminal shows a message "There was an error creating the child process for this terminal" and stays blank.

It was working properly in Intrepid.

[MichaelM (michael-the-drummer)]

I have a similar problem after doing an upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 beta.

Attempting to start gnome-terminal results in an error message saying "There was an error creating the child process for this terminal". And I'm left with an unusable window where my bash shell should be.

SSH'ing into the box results in an error:

PTY allocation request failed on channel 0

Dropping into a console and attempting to run an xterm results in a similar problem:

michael@desktop:~$ export DISPLAY=:0.0
michael@desktop:~$ xterm
xterm: Error 32, errno 2: No such file or directory
Readon: get_pty: not enough ptys

or starting a gnome-terminal from the console:

michael@desktop:~$ gnome-terminal
Failed to contact the GConf daemon; exiting.

This is the second machine I upgraded to the beta. My laptop (the first machine) does not have this problem, so I am not sure what is different that would cause this problem to occur now.

[MichaelM (michael-the-drummer)]

This is not a Gnome Do Plugins issue, it is a problem with ptys in Ubuntu. I have marked this as affecting gnome-terminal (which it does), but I believe it is a bigger issue than that. I am not sure what project this should be set to, but gnome-terminal is a better option than Gnome Do Plugins

[MichaelM (michael-the-drummer)]

I thought this may have been caused by the maximum number of ptys set incorrectly, however:

$michael@desktop:~$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/pty/max
4096

$michael@desktop:~$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/pty/nr
3

So, 4096 available, with 3 in use, and xterm complaining that there are not enough. I'm not sure where to go from here.

[MichaelM (michael-the-drummer)]

OK, I have figured this out.

It is caused by the fact that /dev/pts is not mounted at boot. I can mount it with the following command:

sudo mount -t devpts -o gid=5,mode=620 devpts /dev/pts

However, I will either need to do this at each boot, or add it to fstab. My laptop doesn't have an entry in fstab, which leads me to think this is not the correct solution. I am assuming that udev should be mounting /dev/pts. Can anyone direct me to the rule that is responsible for this?

[Piotr Szczepanik (piter75)]

Michael,
what version of gnome-do-plugins have you got installed?

In 0.8.1.3+dfsg-0ubuntu2 the "bug" is fixed and SSH plugin works like a charm. And devpts is not mounted anyway.

Even with 0.8.0.2 I have managed to find a workaround for this by changing "/desktop/gnome/applications/terminal/exec_arg" GConf's value to "-e" instead of "-x" I've had before.

I think we can close this bug.

[Andreas Moog (ampelbein)]

Thanks for reporting, I think this is a dupe of 321927