nautilus sometimes crashes when opening new window

[Rui Mesquita]

Nautilus has crashed quite a few times since I started using Ubuntu starting with dapper flight 7, though lately it has done so much less often. I'm not able to reproduce this crash consistently, all I can say is it happens more or less often depending on how well behaved nautilus is felling when I log on, and only happens when I open a new nautilus window by whatever means (places menu, desktop, etc.), no specific partition/device.

Below are attached two tracebacks, one with just the debug symbols for nautilus, the other after I installed the ones for other packages which I found mentioned in the first one. They were copy/pasted from the 'inform developers' option of the crash dialogue.

Don't know how useful this could be, how common the bug is, or if it has been submited before (couldn't find it with the search function), I'm just submiting this bug to know if theres something can be done, and/or if I have to reinstall Ubuntu to fix it. The worst that can happen is this bug gets rejected :-)

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

nautilus-dbg (2.14.1-0ubuntu9)

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

nautilus-dbg (2.14.1-0ubuntu9)
libc6-dbg (2.3.6-0ubuntu20)
libglib1.2-dbg (1.2.10-10.1build1)
libglib2.0-0-dbg (2.10.2-1ubuntu3)
libgnomevfs2-0-dbg (2.14.1-0ubuntu8)
libgtk1.2-dbg (1.2.10-18)
libgtk2.0-0-dbg (2.8.17-1ubuntu5)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug. I've forwarded it upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343488
Reinstalling is not really likely to make a difference on linux, you reinstall the same software there is no reason that automagically fixes a bugged code

Do you use the browser or the spatial mode. Maybe you could figure what actions you are doing or if there is something you do that trigger that?

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

There really is no sure way to trigger this bug; clicking on a partition on the desktop might work now, but in five minutes it might trigger a crash. Admittedly what seems to trigger it most often is calling a partition directly from the 'removable media' menu under 'Places' , though it's certainly not exclusive to this procedure; I've had nautilus crash when calling the downloads folder from the Firefox download manager.

I have uploaded a screenshot of the nautilus window that appears after I simply click on the 'Home Folder' option under the 'Places' menu:
http://img303.imageshack.us/my.php?image=nautilus24no.png

I think I've tried the spatial mode before but I'm not sure if I was using the Konqueror file manager since I can't figure out now how to activate it in Nautilus.

And as you can see, there are a bunch of duplicate buttons for opening the current folder on a terminal (from the nautilus-open-terminal package) that don't happen to work most times (they open a terminal on my home folder). They started appearing like this only after the last few times I updated this box about a week ago. Before there was there an option for opening the current folder with Konqueror.

After purging and reinstalling the nautilus-open-terminal package, the duplicate buttons remain, but at least sellecting the option from the right click menu now works again.

I've had other issues towards the end of the beta fase that other people were describing on the official ubuntu irc support channel, such as having my username removed from the sudoers (admin) group, and X getting it's configuration messed up.

I guess using a development beta always involves these kind of issues, that's why it's called a development release, no matter how careful the developers are, there are always incompatabilities or specific cases which cannot be predicted, and which should be reported by the users.

I think I will really prefer to reinstall eventually in a few days when the final version comes out.

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

Forgot to mention I'm using a Ubuntu installation which was dist-upgraded from a fresh Breezy install to Dapper Beta, and I have been using it regularly for about a month.

Just thought I'd mention this since some of the bugs I've been experiencing have been reported as being related to performing the upgrade from Breezy to Dapper.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the spatial mode is used when you uncheck the "always use the browser" to the preferences pane

upgrading should work as fine as upgrading but maybe you installed some packages creating the issue though

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

Seems this bug still crops up on my system after a fresh install of the final Dapper release, happened when calling my home folder from the 'places' menu.

I really don't know, if other people aren't getting this bug too, maybe it's something with my hardware configuration or something I configured or installed, though I haven't done much yet besides change the theme, add a couple of app launchers to the panel, change the X configuration and little more.

I have installed all the debug symbols I installed in Dapper Beta, and will post the traceback here should nautilus crash again.

I will include now the list of packages I installed so far before this bug happened again , just in case...

ps. This time even gedit crashed(!) when I was creating the file with the installed packages list from Synaptic. Never happened to me before...

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

installed packages

[DarkMageZ (darkmagez)]

i think my issue might be related to this bug.

after some time (afew hours) of the computer being on. if i click on places then storage (ext3 partition on a 250gb hd). then i get a crash... the *common possible* things the system has done during this time is idle, xchat (from universe), gaim, firefox & evolution.

this is a clean install (thats right, even a brand new /home/) from ubuntu dapper beta 2.

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

I also experience crashes when opening Nautilus sometimes in Dapper LTS 6.06 with dapper-updates.
Some basic hardware information of my PC (perhaps this is helpfull):
- Athlon XP 1700+ using 2.6.15-25-k7 kernel
- Video card: NVIDIA TNT2 M64

I was able to get a backtrace (nautilus-dbg and libglib2.0-0-dbg are installed) from a crash. The crash happened after clicking Places -> Home Folder, see attachment.

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

The crash happened after clicking Places -> Home Folder.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Do some people have a reliable way to get that issue? Is anybody wanting to debug it or trying to rebuild nautilus without patches to note if that still happen then?

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

Still getting some crashes like described in this report. what I do to get around this is I keep a nautilus window open in the computer:/// location, and from there I open the mount I need in a new window. I either do this, or I would be getting a handful of nautilus crashes daily.

For a while nautilus would crash when browsing between folder, but now it's back to 'only' crashing when opening a new window. Since this 2nd bug, nautilus now gets increasingly sluggish with usage, and eventually it would crash, a memory leak maybe? I have a bunch backtraces from this second bug, should it be helpful.

About debugging this problem, I would like to help out doing whatever needs to be done, bear in mind, though, I'm not a developer by any definition (and specially not with C! bleehh! ;P)

Ah, and just thought I should mention my hardware config:

AMD Sempron64 2600+
1GB RAM DDR400
ATI Radeon 9600PRO 256MB
SBLive! with MIDI bay (currently not installed)

disks:
1x250GB ATA disk
1x120GB ATA disk
1x250GB SATA disk 8MB cache

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

if somebody is having that issue regulary, could you look for errors printed to ~/.xsession-errors or run nautilus from a command line to note them: gnome-session-remove nautilus && nautilus

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

what sidebar are people having that issue are using?

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

"what sidebar are people having that issue are using?"

I've got the context information sidebar selected, usually folded (just click on the resize bar), and hardlly ever change it.

I will try using nautilus for a while after loading it with that command. Right now the only line in my .xsession-errors mentioning nautilus is this:

Initializing nautilus-open-terminal extension

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

Ok, here's the output in the console after I run nautilus with that command, and then it crashes. I somehow managed to make nautilus crash three times in row by following a few steps, the output always looks the same except for the pid in the last line.
That last line is what appears when nautilus crashed, and I will also attach the backtrace.

=======
=======

~$ gnome-session-remove nautilus && nautilus
Removing 'nautilus' from the session

(gnome-session-remove:11501): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_shell_parse_argv: assertion `command_line != NULL' failed
Initializing nautilus-open-terminal extension
totem-video-thumbnailer couln't open file 'file:///home/rpedro/Documents/downloads/aMule/preferences.dat'
Reason: There is no plugin to handle this movie..
totem-video-thumbnailer couln't open file 'file:///home/rpedro/Documents/downloads/aMule/preferencesKad.dat'
Reason: There is no plugin to handle this movie..

** (nautilus:11502): CRITICAL **: nautilus_file_get_uri: assertion `NAUTILUS_IS_FILE (file)' failed

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for the efforts on that issue. What sort of device do you open? Is that a slow one?

Could you try to get a backtrace of the assertion like that:
- gnome-session-remove nautilus
- gdb --args nautilus --g-fatal-warnings
(gdb) run
... when you get the crash nautilus should freeze, go back to the gdb prompt and enter "thread apply all bt"

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

"What sort of device do you open? Is that a slow one?"

It's a regular fat32 partition, and indeed if I follow the steps I did just now, and open an ext3 partition, nautilus doesn't crash. I tried all possible combinations for the device icons on my desktop, and it always crashes on the first fat32 partition I call. (at least following these steps; I'm pretty certain it has crashed before on just about every device, even a few times when I called my downloads folder from Firefox.)

I will attach the backtrace from gdb.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you again for the work on that. I've built a package with a potential fix from upstream, i386 binaries are available on http://people.ubuntu.com/~seb128/debug/47619/. Could you install the deb from there (download the deb you need (no need of the -dev packages if you don't have them already installed) and install them with "sudo dpkg -i *.deb"), restart nautilus and try if you still get the issue?

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

Ok, I installed the patched debs, and I no longer get the crash(!) with the procedure I had. I also left various nautilus windows open overnight and been fooling around for a few minutes, browising folders, opening a few new nautilus windows, and all is running OK :-)

As an added bonus, this patch seems to have fixed the issue I mentioned to you before, where nautilus would, over time, get increasingly slow browsing between folders, until finally it would crash.

So congratulations! and thank you very much for the fix! :-)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your work on that issue it has been really useful to fix the issue. I'll try to get the fix accepted for edgy and to dapper-updates too

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Fixed package uploaded to edgy:

 nautilus (2.16.1-0ubuntu3) edgy; urgency=low
 .
   * debian/patches/90_from_cvs_fix_crash_on_window_opening.patch:
     - patch from CVS, fix crasher happening sometime on windows opening
       (Ubuntu: #47619)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

fixed package available to edgy

[towsonu2003 (towsonu2003)]

should this be backported to dapper so gnome-bugs doesn't have to continue triaging new duplicates (which seem to come everyday or so)? that would take off some of their already-heavy work load.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Le vendredi 20 octobre 2006 à 21:43 +0000, towsonu2003 a écrit :
> should this be backported to dapper so gnome-bugs doesn't have to
> continue triaging new duplicates (which seem to come everyday or so)?
> that would take off some of their already-heavy work load.

have you read previous comments?

"Thank you for your work on that issue it has been really useful to fix
the issue. I'll try to get the fix accepted for edgy and to
dapper-updates too"

by example

[towsonu2003 (towsonu2003)]

> by example

yes, my suggestion was more of a "reminder" ;) I waited for someone to click the "backport fix to release" buton for a (too little?) while :)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Le samedi 21 octobre 2006 à 23:53 +0000, towsonu2003 a écrit :
> > by example
>
> yes, my suggestion was more of a "reminder" ;) I waited for someone to
> click the "backport fix to release" buton for a (too little?) while :)

you didn't wait 10 min after the bug closing, that's effectively too
short for people to test the edgy version and consider a backport

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

Seems the fix for this bug may have uncovered a more serious bug with HAL on Dapper. I filed a bug report about it here :
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/hal/+bug/68574

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

I'm still experiencing the new bug that was possibly exposed by the patch for the one on this page. I though it had somehow gone away, but it started happening again.

I suggest holding back this patch until the other bug is sorted out. Somehow I prefer a few nautilus crashes to a messed up hal plus forced reboot, so I have already reverted my system to the previous nautilus packages.

I'll wait until someone takes a look at the other bug to install the packages with the patch in question again, and help out figuring out debugging it.

[Rui Mesquita (rpedro78)]

OK, so this bug happened again on my system a few days ago, with the old nautilus packages (from the regular 'dapper' repo), so the new bug is perhaps not related to this, or at least it can happen without the patch from this bug report applied to nautilus.
Also, at first this bug would surface after just a few hours of usage; then it was intermitent, while right now it's been a long time since the last time I had it.

I have already installed again the packages referenced here in this bug report, and so far (a few days) with no issues.

[Daniel Betschart (dbet1)]

I have worked now for several weeks with sebastiens packages from the above link (2.14.3-0ubuntu2) and had no crash again. Bevore I had this version, Nautilus crashed regularly.
Please put this fix to dapper-updates. Thank you.