9.10 (Karmic): gnome-volume-control segmentation fault on startup (crashed with SIGSEGV in _int_free())

[rifter]

Binary package hint: gnome-media

I was trying to fill in this bug earlier and firefox crashed (it has been doing that a lot lately) so I had to start over. Hopefully I did not create any duplicates.

Ubuntu guidelines:
Please include, if possible:

The source package you found the bug in, for help see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage .
gnome-media
This is the package that contains gnome-volume-control

1) The release of Ubuntu you are using, via 'lsb_release -rd' or System -> About Ubuntu.
rifter@leviathan$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 9.10
Release: 9.10

2) The version of the package you are using, via 'apt-cache policy packagename' or by checking in Synaptic.
rifter@leviathan$ apt-cache policy gnome-media
gnome-media:
  Installed: 2.28.1-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 2.28.1-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 2.28.1-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

3) What you expected to happen
The sound preferences dialog should have opened.

4) What happened instead
gnome-volume-control crashed with a segmentation fault.

When I start gnome-volume-control either from System->Preferences->Sound or from the command line I get a segmentation fault. I am including strace, valgrind, and gdb output for this (with the --debug option) in this report, as well as .xsession-errors
I installed all the debug packages I could find from the regular repositories and, where there were none there, ddeb as described in the following:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Backtrace
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Valgrind
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Strace

Some further information that might be relevant:

I am using the AMD 64 bit Ubuntu Desktop version 9.10

rifter@leviathan$ uname -a
Linux leviathan 2.6.31-20-server #58-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 12 05:40:05 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

gnome-volume-control was working fine before, and in fact the applet that appears in the top bar works fine as well as the sound.
Also, some weird things have been happening on my system ever since I installed some fonts from synaptic (firefox crashes regularly, the appearance preferences crash instead of starting, and some apps like xchat have font rendering problems). I am looking into getting rid of them to see if that helps anything, but I am not sure the gnome-volume-control problem relates there because I think it was working after that. I'm just including that in the interest of completeness; hopefully that will not become a bunny trail. Installing fonts should not break those things (with the possible exception of the xchat problem), but I am pretty sure that was all I did before those things broke. I have done a lot of other stuff between that and the time I noticed the gnome-volume-control problem.

I also recently installed libsdl1.2debian-all and had previously either libsdl1.2debian-alsa or libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio (I forget which). I have tried changing between those three and libsdl1.2debian-esd but the crash happens no matter which I use, so I have gone back to libsdl1.2debian-all. I had installed libsdl1.2debian-esd before on a different machine for the same reason (to get gfceux compiled and working) without causing this problem.

In any case I am only including this information in the interest of completeness in case it seems relevant. I want to focus on fixing gnome-volume-control for now and worry about the rest later.

ProblemType: Crash
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Apr 14 18:30:17 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-volume-control
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: gnome-media 2.28.1-0ubuntu1
ProcCmdline: gnome-volume-control --debug
ProcCwd: /home/rifter
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-20.58-server
SegvAnalysis:
 Segfault happened at: 0x7f151bdb040a <_int_free+970>: cmp 0x18(%rax),%r12
 PC (0x7f151bdb040a) ok
 source "0x18(%rax)" (0x100000000029) not located in a known VMA region (needed readable region)!
 destination "%r12" ok
SegvReason: reading unknown VMA
Signal: 11
SourcePackage: gnome-media
StacktraceTop:
 _int_free (av=0x7f151c0a3e40, p=0x180c490)
 *__GI___libc_free (mem=<value optimized out>)
 graphite_PangoGlyphString (text=0x180a606 "",
 pango_shape (text=0x180a606 "", length=1,
 shape_run (line=0x1536050, state=0x7fff3916f180,
Title: gnome-volume-control crashed with SIGSEGV in _int_free()
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-20-server x86_64
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout lpadmin plugdev sambashare

[rifter (rifter0x0000)]

One other thing ... I know that I have installed several updates from update manager since the font problem. It could just as well be that one of these broke gnome-volume-control.

[rifter (rifter0x0000)]

This turns out to be a duplicate of the following bug because it was caused by pango-graphite

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pango-graphite/+bug/404681

pango-graphite broke my gnome-volume-control as well as gnome-appearance-properties by causing segfaults. It also caused xchat to break as far as how it renders fonts (the end of the line would get cut off and some words would be mashed together ... highlighting the line revealed the beginning and end that were cut off) , and, I am sure, caused instability in Firefox (constant crashes just from running it). Uninstalling pango-graphite fixed the appearance as well as the volume control problem.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for the update, closing as duplicate