Guake does not bind to F12, will not start correctly

[Andrew Colello]

Guake 0.5.0-2 was working fine on ubuntu 15.04 until yesterday when I installed several common packages such as MySQL, virtualenv . Now, it will only work when i open in a hackish way using two regular terminal windows .

If I type guake in a terminal instance, it does nothing at all except showing a spinning wheel. sudo guake on a single terminal produces several messages as follows:

libglade-WARNING **: unknown attribute 'swapped' for <signal>.

Then, it hangs indefinitely on the following message:

WARNING **: Binding '<Primary>F12' failed!

However, if I leave it running and open another terminal window, sudo guake immediately works and opens guake, except F12 is still not mapped to anything (it, like other function keys, defaults to ~ in a terminal window). Doing a regular guake call here also produces nothing.

I have been trying to debug this for two days and I was stumped, so I upgraded to Guake 0.7 using the official github.

Now, it never opens. When I call sudo guake in a normal terminal, I get the following error from Python:

  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/guake/guake_app.py", line 801, in is_using_unity
            if os.environ.get('XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP').lower() == "unity".lower():

AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'lower'

Also, when I try to install and build directly from the guake-master directory using ./dev.py --reinstall, I get the same error.

I believe the error is because the installer is using Python 3.4 to install guake, and os.environ.get('XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP') returns a 'NoneType' object in 3.4 but returns 'unity', as expected, in 2.7.

I am thoroughly confused on how to fix this. I am using Unity. What else can I try? Can I force the installer to use Python 2.7?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[vour (ko4egapin)]

XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP is undefined
Previous update fixed this - I removed my workaround
Last update returned this bag again - I have to put my workaround again

[Chris (cmavr8)]

@vour, could you please share your workaround?

[Robert Matusewicz (matekm)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test it on a currently supported Ubuntu version. When you test it and it is still an issue, kindly upload the updated logs by running only once:
apport-collect 1485151

and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for guake (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]