Nautilus randomly crashes on wallpaper change

[Pablo180]

This only seemed to start happening recently, the past couple of weeks or so, not sure whether that was when I first noticed it or whether it was caused by an update, but sometimes when Variety changes the wallpaper, it causes Nautilus to exit.

I'm sure it is caused by Variety as I have seen it happen as the wallpaper changes several times now. This doesn't happen every change, it seems fairly random but several times a day and it may have something to do with the size of the background as when Nautilus crashes the wallpaper seems stretched (like it is set to Fill or Zoom) but on a Nautilus restart the wallpaper goes back to its proper size.

This is on Ubuntu 12.04, Variety 0.4.9 (and on version 0.4.8) and Nautilus 3.4.2

If you need any more information, please let me know.

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

Here are some suggestions you might try:

Run Variety in a terminal with -vv option: "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/variety/bin/variety -vv" and see if there any exceptions there or anything suspicious around the moment when Nautilus crashes. E.g. it might be some specific image that is causing the wallpaper subsystems in Ubuntu to misbehave (and specifically Nautilus).

Remove or comment everything in the .config/variety/scripts/set_wallpaper - Variety should work on Unity/Gnome even without this file, and there it runs additional commands to set the wallpaper on other DEs, so something there might be causing the problem.

Run gnome-tweak-tool and there uncheck "Have file manager handle the desktop" and see if it is better that way.

Personally I doubt this is caused specifically by Variety, and I suppose it is a problem of the Ubuntu subsytems related to wallapper drawing for a couple of reasons:

-The only thing Variety does to change the wallpaper is to point the wallpaper setting in GSetting to the new wallpaper file. From there on it is GNOME settings daemon, Nautilus, Compiz, etc. actually updating the wallpaper - Variety plays no role there. On my PC even if Variety puts some completely random junk in this setting (e.g. a path to a non-existing file), then the result is that the wallpaper becomes blank, nothing crashes.

-Variety does not instruct GNOME how to draw the wallpaper (Zoom, Scale, Stretch or whatever) - GNOME uses it's own setting for this (see it in Appearance settings). Variety provides no options for this and has no logic related to this.

[Pablo180 (paultait22)]

Thanks for the quick response, I'll give these a try. I didn't think it was Variety at first either, I thought it was Conky initially, but it only seems to happen as the wallpaper changes. I'll see if I can reproduce it without Conky and I'll experiment with these options and report back what works and what was causing it.

Thanks again.

[Pablo180 (paultait22)]

I've tried those suggestions, the first one didn't show any errors or anything untoward with Variety when Nautilus crashed.

I tried the second suggestion (commenting out everything in the set_wallpaper script), but it wouldn't change the wallpaper without the Gnome 3, Unity section. When I added that back in it worked fine, but I kept the rest commented out. It seems to have worked fine since then, it hasn't crashed at all (normally happens several times a day) for the past few days.

I've also just spent 20 mins scrolling through all the wallpapers, including a few that I know for definite that it crashed on previously, all without problems. So it looks like the problem is solved, thank you!

I've had a few other wallpaper changers installed before and I certainly remember either installing Feh or using a program that installed it, so I wonder whether it was the remnants of those that were causing a problem.

Thanks again for your help and the great software.

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

Great! If you have the time, please try uncommenting those lines one at a time (starting with the Feh one you suspect) to see which one exactly is causing the problem. This may be useful for other users, and I may also consider removing it from the defaults.

[Pablo180 (paultait22)]

No problem, I've done that and I can confirm that the problem was caused by Feh; I uncommented that line and scrolled through a few wallpapers and the problem occurred again (Nautilus exiting) within a minute or two. I tried all the others line by line and even altogether, scrolling through the wallpaper collection a few times without any problems. Just to be sure, I went back and uncommented only the Feh line again and once again Nautilus crashed after just a handful of wallpaper changes. So it certainly appears to be a Feh problem.

Thanks again and I hope this is useful.

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

Thanks a lot. I'll probably also comment the line then - the crashing problem seems to outweight the gain of having it supported out of the box.

[Andriy Golovnya (andriy-golovnya)]

Similar problem on Ubuntu 12.10 x64 (GNOME classic) with custom slideshow.xml . I made a script that builds custom XML file with all images in current folder and starts this XML as a default wallpaper slideshow. All works fine except sporadic crashes of nautilus and moment when wallpaper tries to change. So the problem seems very similar to me.

Try to put 100 - 200 images (JPG/PNG) to a folder and run attached script in this folder. After few changes the nautilus tends to crash.

[Andriy Golovnya (andriy-golovnya)]

I've fond a small failure in the script posted earlier with an empty <to></to> section.
I'll try this new version and post a result here.

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

It would be better to post this as a bug in Nautilus - as far as I understand it is not a problem of Variety, and Variety's behaviour that was triggering this bug was fixed some months ago.