KARMIC - Selecting the Ubuntu column dims then hangs Synaptic.

[emarkay]

Binary package hint: synaptic

I wanted to see what the "recommended" packages are and so I clicked on the upper header on the column where the Ubuntu symbol is. Synaptic then dimmed to 50% brightness and then hung. It can not be reloaded after closing it manually; a reboot is needed then to reuse Synaptic.

[jtniehof (jtniehof)]

Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: synaptic 0.62.7ubuntu6
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic i686
UserGroups: adm admin audio cdrom dialout dip disk floppy lpadmin netdev plugdev powerdev sambashare scanner vboxusers video

[jtniehof (jtniehof)]

I can confirm synaptic going non-responsive on karmic (synaptic 0.62.7ubuntu6)
Steps to reproduce:
System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager
Click on the unlabelled column ("Supported") between "Status" and "Package."
Synaptic immediately goes non-responsive and will not redraw.

Clicking on the "close" button and choosing "Force quit" kills the window, but the process is still running.
sudo killall synaptic (do not need -9) will kill synaptic and it can be restarted again, operating normally.

[Wim Lewis (wiml)]

I encountered (and then reported) this bug about 20 minutes ago, but noticed that eventually synaptic did recover and become responsive again. On my (fairly underpowered) machine it took almost 10 minutes to recover. So perhaps this is not a hang at all but just an extremely slow sorting operation, see also Bug #165181 ?