[lubuntu-users] Desktop crashing (18.04)?

[Mark F]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2018 at 10:12 PM Walter Lapchynski <wxl at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> > I didn't think this is related because GIMP had a major upgrade. But,
> GIMP
> > became very unstable for me (similar random freezing; kill it, start
> > again).
>
> Could be related if say it's somehow a GTK issue. Is this only in the
> file picker or is this within the normal GIMP?


The GIMP crashes are random (while color-balancing, contrast-brightness
adjusting, etc.). It seems similar to the pcmanfm crash because it
manifests itself when I click (and realize it's frozen). I might click to
increase/decrease the brightness (in the midst of playing with those values
before applying them).


> The one problem with debugging tools is that you generally have to have
> them running and building up logs of activity while you try to reproduce
> the issue. Well, that's not normally a problem, but with one where you
> don't have a clear process to reproduce the issue, you may have to wait
> a long time, which might mean a huge log file.
>

I'm running strace now. In case anyone else is having crashes and wants to
do this too:

pidof pcmanfm
kill <pid from previous command>

strace -Ff -tt pcmanfm --desktop 2>&1 | tee strace-pcmanfm.log


I didn't add the "&disown" parm to the pcmanfm command being straced. It
seemed clearer to let it remain attached to strace. I could have straced
the already running/disowned pcmanfm using its PID[1]. That might be
simpler. But, killing pcmanfm and starting it with strace might capture the
console output in a way tracing the pid wouldn't(?).

I use my laptop casually. I can manually rotate the log file. (Or, schedule
an hourly cron job to do it.).

Now, It's just a matter of time till I have some strace info. I'll post to
the bug report when I have something.

(Sidenote: For a long time these pcmanfm crashes were causing a "program
crashed, would you like to send a crash report?" dialog. I always assumed
someone was getting those (probably from lots of users) and divining
something from it. I haven't seen that dialog for awhile. I've forgotten if
I clicked something saying "never ask again." There was even a time when I
thought someone was trying to fix it because after an automatic update, it
seemed like the desktop restarted itself. Then it went back to me having to
open a terminal and start it manually.).

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Strace , see the pidof example.
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