I have xfce4 beta1 (4.1.90), gtk-engines-xfce 2.2.0, and am running a gentoo system with 2.6.8 kernel. After uninstalling the stable version (4.0.6), and installing the beta, I encountered the following problem: For some reason on one of the users, after xfce starts, panel does not load, nor the menus are accessible. Others work fine. My guess was that it is xfce4-session that was responsible, so I commented it out in ~/.config/xfce4/xinitrc, and restarted xfce, and it now gives a message: "A crash occured in the panel. Please report this to the xfce4-dev@moongroup.com group. Meanwhile the panel will be restarted." (Sidenote: xfcalendar did not load with xfce4-session, and now it does). The message continues to cycle merrily in a vicious circle. Again, under any other users it works fine. I tried deleting all the files that xfce4 creates, and restart, but that does not help. There is only one explanation that I can think of. During the compilation, I logged in as that user once most of the packages were there. On other hand uninstalling and recompilling did not help either. Running xfce4-panel in a terminal just gives: Segmentation fault. I am not sure how to get more debug information out of it without installing a gdb (which I am not too keen on doing, but can do). Are there any debug flags, that can be used?
I'm afraid you need a debugger (gdb) to get this information. What we need is a backtrace. In a terminal type: $ gdb xfce4-panel gdb> run ... *crash* gdb> bt <output> Thanks, Jasper
Created attachment 74 The log of stuff that gdm generates. Unfortunately, its kinda not all that informative, except for the reference of xfce_kiosk_free() from /usr/lib/libxfce4util.so.1 If you need to see the stacks and the like, I'll do it after I get some sleep. HTH.
Comment on attachment 74 The log of stuff that gdm generates. >Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. >0x4008e7e6 in xfce_kiosk_free () from /usr/lib/libxfce4util.so.1 (gdb) bt #0 0x4008e7e6 in xfce_kiosk_free () from /usr/lib/libxfce4util.so.1 #1 0x00000001 in ?? () #2 0x00000001 in ?? () (gdb) c Continuing. Program terminated with signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. The program no longer exists. (gdb) quit -- Err, sorry for missing the bt part. Im kind of sleepy after the night shift. Here it is.
Thanks. Very strange it should crash here. I'll investigate.
Created attachment 75 GDB of xfce4-session, no backtrace. (In reply to comment #4) > Thanks. Very strange it should crash here. I'll investigate. I did run xfce4-session through the gdm to see what it does, and it seems to indicate that the panel is the offender. session runs all well untill: It times out on something. I bet it is the panel.
(In reply to comment #5) > I bet it is the panel. It is, sorry, I saw that already from the backtrace. Unfortunately, I don't see how it can crash on that particular piece of code :/ Must be some sort of memory corruption. I never heard of this before, so I'm not sure where to start looking. If you find out more, please let me know. This bug will be hard to find, I fear.
Ok, I managed to work around this bug. I backed up my home directory, deleted user (along with /home and all stuff in /var related to that user account). I recreated the user with the same uid, and will now start poking to see what causes the breakage. I'll post any updates I find out. It seems to be a very esoteric bug.
And now I know what causes it. At least how to make it reproducable. It is related to user belonging to some specific group (I have a vague idea what it might be, but not exact group). I've managed to both make the panel work (i.e. by deleting/adding my user, and then by trying restore it to what it was during the crashes). For some reason, that particular user belonged to all existing groups. And belonging to one of them, makes the panel crash. It is supposed to be reproducable. Neither KDE nor Xfce 4.0.6 had problem with that too.
(In reply to comment #8) > And now I know what causes it. At least how to make it reproducable. > It is related to user belonging to some specific group (I have a vague idea what > it might be, but not exact group). I've managed to both make the panel work > (i.e. by deleting/adding my user, and then by trying restore it to what it was > during the crashes). For some reason, that particular user belonged to all > existing groups. And belonging to one of them, makes the panel crash. > > It is supposed to be reproducable. Neither KDE nor Xfce 4.0.6 had problem with > that too. That's very helpful, thanks. It's definitely an Xfce bug, in the new kiosk mode support to be precise. That should make it much easier to find.
(In reply to comment #9) > > That's very helpful, thanks. It's definitely an Xfce bug, in the new kiosk mode > support to be precise. That should make it much easier to find. Guess I was a bit too soon. It's still unclear how that bug could happen. We've made a few changes, so hopefully the next pre-release (RC1) will no have this problem.
Please reopen if it still happens with RC1.