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I have an ubuntu 18 04 (updated to 20 04 1 LTS while trying to fix issue) in virtualbox, and it started to crash since today, i think it started after i ok'ed a software update (minor, not distro upgrade). The gnome shell terminates, i get back to the login. It mainly seems to happen when i open a webbrowser, but also other situations, eg. opening an unconfigured thunderbird.

A few times, i also got different error windows within gnome "system error detected" or similar: [update] I did a separate Question on the different error-messages: 'System Program Problem Detected' vs "Sorry, Ubuntu * has experienced an internal error" [/update]

At first, i tried different things like apt-get update/upgrade, where i got some Hash Sum mismatch errors . Lots of experimenting with clear and --fix-missing got me around this, but the crashing persisted. So after a snapshot in virtualbox, i did the upgrade to 20 04, hoping that would fix the unknown problem along the way. But no, it did not. I found some tips recommending to look at the output of journalctl -e and other logfiles. But there's way too much stuff, and i don't know what to look into and what to look over. in /var/log/boot.log i see some fails,

Failed to start Snap Daemon. [repeatedly]
Failed to start Docker Application Container Engine. [repeatedly]
Failed to start Wait until snapd is fully seeded.
Failed to start containerd container runtime.
Failed to start GRUB failed boot detection.

i see some logs in /var/crash:

_usr_bin_gnome-shell.1000.crash
_usr_bin_gnome-software.1000.crash
_usr_lib_gdm3_gdm-session-worker.0.crash
_usr_lib_policykit-1_polkitd.0.crash

How could i get closer to finding the problem's source?

@heynnema's comments:

Wayland and Switcheroo, not that i know of. It is a default 1804 install.

A propos Switcheroo, i am on a Dell Precision with Quadro M2000M. Switchable Graphics is "off" in the bios, i tried "on", same effect.

~$ dpkg -l *irtualbox*
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                     Version      Architecture Description
+++-========================-============-============-=================================
un  virtualbox-guest-dkms    <none>       <none>       (no description available)
un  virtualbox-guest-modules <none>       <none>       (no description available)

~$ ls -al ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
ls: cannot access '/home/toro/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions': No such file or directory


~$ ls -al /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Okt  7 17:52 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Okt  7 17:56 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Okt  7 17:52 desktop-icons@csoriano
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Okt  7 17:45 ubuntu-appindicators@ubuntu.com
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Okt  7 17:45 ubuntu-dock@ubuntu.com

Virtualbox runs on latest win10x64. I tried different graphics Settings with and without 3d accel., Made no difference.

sirtet
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  • Generally, the cause of each crash is in the appropriate .crash file. So start by reading .crash file, and see what you understand. Sometimes is very clear, sometimes you must be a detective. Two crashes that look alike to you may have completely different causes. – user535733 Oct 07 '20 at 23:26
  • Thanks. I found this on how to look at .crash files. But i'm still pretty lost in the woods. I uploaded some files with pastebinit, but first had to truncate the long coredump lines with cut:1, 2, 3 – sirtet Oct 08 '20 at 11:35
  • Advice: 1) Don't upgrade to fix a problem. That rarely works. 2) Don't fret that you don't understand everything. Nobody does. Don't fret that you cannot fix everything. Nobody can. Focus on what you DO know or what you want to learn. 3) Start with your software-properties-gtk. It's written in Python3, and the error messages are very clear. That's a good bite-sized one for you to decipher. – user535733 Oct 08 '20 at 12:10
  • Ok. I think i see the errors that software-properties ran into, line 872ff, same as when i do apt update on the commandline. But i doubt this caused the crash, i'd expect that would return an error in the UI... So, i guess it is something else that's "very clear" in there to u? – sirtet Oct 08 '20 at 15:15
  • Are you running Wayland? Are you running switcheroo? Edit your question and show me dpkg -l *irtualbox* and ls -al ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions and ls -al /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions. – heynnema Oct 09 '20 at 14:52
  • Virtualbox is running on what host OS? – heynnema Oct 09 '20 at 20:56
  • @heynnema, added Host Details. – sirtet Oct 11 '20 at 09:30
  • Just copy off any data that you have in the VM, and do a clean install of Ubuntu, then restore the data. Much simpler. – heynnema Oct 11 '20 at 14:14
  • Yes... i already started that, but was hoping to learn something about analyzing Crash Hauses. – sirtet Oct 11 '20 at 17:57

1 Answers1

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I've also been getting these gnome-shell crashes on my Jetson Nano 4.9.140-tegra aarch64 kernel running Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS since doing some minor updates last week. My /var/log/apport.log showed:

ERROR: apport (pid 22141) Tue Oct 27 08:41:37 2020: executable: /usr/lib/tracker/tracker-extract (command line "/usr/li$

which, I believe means the /usr/lib/tracker/tracker-extract executable file is corrupt. So I simply deleted it with:

sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/tracker/tracker-extract

and cleared /var/crash so I could monitor new crash reports. I have now rebooted several times without incident.

I also got:

ERROR: apport (pid 7017) Mon Oct 26 00:14:28 2020: executable: /usr/lib/gdm3/gdm-session-worker (command line "gdm-sess$
ERROR: apport (pid 7017) Mon Oct 26 00:14:28 2020: is_closing_session(): no DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS in environment

but I think this may be due to the corrupt tracker-extract executable, as it has not recurred after removing the corrupt executable. Hope this helps.

BeastOfCaerbannog
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jromero
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