clicking the panel clock will freeze the panel

[jofarmer]

Binary package hint: gnome-panel

1) The release of Ubuntu you are using, via 'lsb_release -rd' or System -> About Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 8.04.1

2) The version of the package you are using, via 'apt-cache policy packagename' or by checking in Synaptic.

1:2.22.2

3) What you expected to happen

left-clicking on the gnome panel watch applet I would expect to be presented a calendar and maybe even location and to-do info.

4) What happened instead

Reproducibly, when I right-click the watch panel applet, everything goes as expected, but when I left-click it, the panel starts to behave erratic: I can use some panel applets, but not the panel and its menu to the left. Killing X and logging back in will give me a desktop without panel, the only thing that helps is a reboot (pressing the power button on my Thinkpad X31 brings up the menu) or sometimes even a force shut down (pressing the power button does not bring up the menu, pressing it for more than 5 seconds shuts the machine down).

I don't know when it started, it just was there suddenly. I tried removing all locations because I thought maybe it was unsuccessfully trying to pull weather data, but that did not help.

When it all starts, the fan spins up, but of course the CPU panel applet will report back C3 (in my case 42% or 600MHz), the last state before the panel froze.

I hope my english is understandable, I am translating from German by myself.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for your bug report. Please try to obtain a backtrace of the hang http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash and attach the file to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

[jofarmer (jofarmer)]

To be frank I tried to create a backtrace, but... well, I know how to basically handle a shell, but I did not succeed. Mainly because I would not know how the gdb package of the panel watch is called. But checking ~.xsession-errors I found this:

(evolution-alarm-notify:5898): libecal-WARNING **: e-cal.c:319: Unexpected response

(evolution-alarm-notify:5898): libecal-WARNING **: e-cal.c:319: Unexpected response

(evolution-alarm-notify:5898): libecal-WARNING **: e-cal.c:319: Unexpected response

(gnome-panel:5878): Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width -9 and height 24
  PID TTY TIME CMD
 5858 ? 00:00:00 pulseaudio

Is that any good? If not please help me to create a backtrace. All packages are installed and maybe I could even handle gdb correctly if I knew the app name to run with gdb. If yours eyes hurt reading this I apologize - I am basicly a slightly over average experienced user, just recently came to ubuntu (from Leopard) and never coded anything (apart from that time long ago in school where you would send a turtle over the screen...)

[Tina Russell (tinarussell)]

Hey, turtles are good programming practice.

I’m getting this bug too, as of today. All the symptoms described are there for me as well, although I never tried restarting X. Instead, I restarted the process with “killall gnome-panel.” After doing that once or twice, the panel stopped automatically coming back (odd!), so I ran it from a terminal to reproduce the crash. Sadly, the panel output didn’t give me anything useful.

I made a backtrace. Keep in mind that the panel froze up and I had to kill the process, so that is what’s represented in the log. (Everything up to the “Program received signal SIGTERM” line is the output I got upon starting the process. Clicking the clock applet crashed the panel, but didn’t produce any output. Everything else is output I received upon or after killing the process.) (...Oh, and the panel was present, but unresponsive, even after I killed its process. It remained until I closed GDB, over its protests that a program was still running. Is that normal?)

I’m using Ubuntu 8.10, “Intrepid Ibex,” with everything up-to-date. (I’d give you the time in UTC, but my panel clock is broken... waaaah...) It might be relevant that I use Mousetweaks for its “delay click” function, and that it stopped working right around when I found this bug. (I don’t know _why_ that would be relevant... I’ll restart X and see if Mousetweaks works again.)

Thanks!

[Chak Man Yeung (dasunst3r)]

When I click on my clock to reveal the weather and other information, the panel would lock up and I am unable to use anything on the panel. However, I was able to issue the command 'killall gnome-panel' by invoking the deskbar, and that caused gnome-panel to restart and I was able to use the panel again.