Randomly, gnome-panel doesn't complete and freezes after login (karmic)

[Rafael Ávila Coya]

Binary package hint: gnome-panel

I have a Dell XPS M1330 notebook with Ubuntu 9.10 installed, and compiz active.

Between 30 and 50% of the times I login, the panels of the desktop don't complete loading (in diferent degrees of completion each of the times it fails), and the applets and icons that do load, are freezed. The only way to overcome this situation is going to tty1 and do a "sudo killall gnome-panel".

I've spoke with another friend with exactly the same computer and system (ubuntu karmic) and he experiences a similar problem.

I'll tell him to report his experience here.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

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.

[Brenlla (brenlla-gmail)]

Yes, that's the same for me: Dell XPS M1330 notebook with Ubuntu 9.10 installed, and compiz active. Gnome doesn't completely load every applet.

So, I think Rafael is going to offer more info about this bug.

[Bubba (kprohn)]

I have a similar (identical?) problem with intermittent panel freezes at boot. I have found ten other bugs with nearly identical trouble.
I have also discovered that I can recover my panel functionality with two steps that you may wish to try. This works 100% of the time on my machine.

Access a terminal (Ctl-Alt-F1) and execute the following command;

 $ killall gnome-panel

The second step is to return to the desktop (Ctl-Alt-F7) and open a "Run application" window (Alt-F2) and execute the command;

 $ gnome-panel --replace

My panels and system are completely functional now (except for missing weather apps). Do not use a desktop terminal for the second command - the process will hang in a terminal. See Bug #466118 for more comments.

Hope this works for you too...

[Rafael Ávila Coya (ravila-edu)]

I can't do the backtrace because gnome-panel is an app that starts automatically when I log in. In the instructions in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Backtrace they tell how to do it
a) starting the app
and
b) generating the bug for already running programms
I would kill gnome-panel and then follow the instructions in a), but the problem is that when I kill gnome-panel, it restarts inmediatly and automaticaly, so no way for a)
And it's non-sense to use the instructions for b), because the bug, when it happens, it happens before you can do what it says in b).
My question is: how can I kill gnome-panel (from tty1 for example) and avoid it to automaticaly restart again. If I could do that, then I could follow the instructions in a), that means, start gnome-panel from gdb and backtrace the bug.

Thanks in advance.

[Alexander Karlstad (alexander.karlstad)]

Same problem here on my Thinkpad T60p after upgrading from Karmic x64.

Along with Rafael I am not quite sure how to do a backtrace here.