Gnome terminal not starting, timeout reached (bionic)

[fcole90]

After a having my memory filled I had to reboot because the system got unresponsive. After that I can no longer open gnome terminal. I tried running it from xterm and the following message appears:

Error constructing proxy for org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.Terminal: Timeout was reached

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: gnome-terminal 3.24.2-0ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.14.0-11.13-generic 4.14.3
Uname: Linux 4.14.0-11-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.8-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Tue Dec 26 10:38:26 2017
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-08-21 (126 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" - Alpha amd64 (20170820)
SourcePackage: gnome-terminal
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Wes (wesinator)]

If this happens again, check to make sure your locale is set properly - https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/92248/why-does-gnome-terminal-crash-is-my-locale-ok/?answer=95006#post-id-95006

[Chen-Han Hsiao (Stanley) (swem)]

I found that this issue could also be triggered by chrome-remote-desktop

After uninstall chrome-remote-desktop, this issue is gone.
(In fact, disable remote connections also helps. Not necessary uninstall chrome-remote-desktop.)

DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04.1
Package: gnome-terminal 3.28.2-1ubuntu1~18.04.1
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-34-generic x86_64

chrome-remote-desktop 69.0.3497.7

[Chen-Han Hsiao (Stanley) (swem)]

While remote connection is enabled for chrome-remote-desktop

There are environment variables for GUI login session. Such as:

CHROME_REMOTE_DESKTOP_SESSION=1
CHROME_USER_DATA_DIR=/home/vagrant/.config/chrome-remote-desktop/chrome-profile

[fcole90 (fcole90)]

I confirm that removing chrome-remote-desktop and rebooting fixed the issue for me too.

[Mariano Aquino (mariano-aquino)]

i have recently installed chrome remote desktop too, and nautilus and terminal stopped working.
running this solved the terminal issue for me, as suggested in this [0] duplicate question:

dbus-update-activation-environment --systemd --all

for some reason, terminal wouldnt launch, but i could use the terminal embedded onto another application (vscode). I'm still looking for clues for the other issue (nautilus)

[0]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/1772259/comments/9

[David Ledger (davidledger)]

I too have the
Error constructing proxy for org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.Terminal: Timeout was reached
problem, but it only affects one user.

$ cat /etc/default/locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
$

... which should be the UK/GB version because that's where I live, but for testing I set it as above.

I don't have chrome remote desktop and never have had.

It works for my test user logins, so it must be something in my environment. It's not a shell startup problem because I see the error message if I run it from an xterm, and the xterm works fine.

There must be something else going on.

David