App windows won't stay open

[doctorbighands]

I just installed Xubuntu 8.10 on my clamshell iBook. When I go to open many apps (not all of them, though), the window will open for a split second and then immediately close. Any ideas why this is happening, and what to do about it?

Thank you!

[adamvan2000]

Ditto for me. It's only certain apps, though there appear to be many of them that do this, including most of the games that are windowed, and my VMware console. I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 on an AMD64 PC, though, so maybe it's not platform specific?

~adamvan2000

[yo.keller]

Ditto for me. It's only certain apps, though there appear to be many of them that do this, including most of the games that are windowed, and my VMware console. I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 on an AMD64 PC, though, so maybe it's not platform specific?

~adamvan2000

I just installed the latest xubuntu-810 on a iMac G3 350 Mhz. I am not sure how I was able to get the xfce interface being displayed at each login - instead of getting the Mac to shut down - but I observed that I could not open a terminal window or a file browser or a Firefox window. However, the Xfce parameter management window works well! And within this some of the windows work well, some just cannot stay open:confused:

yo

[stream303]

Man, this is looking like a somewhat global xubuntu issue. One way to temporarily solve it is to download the ubuntu-desktop, but of course that will set you up for Ubuntu - at least you should be functional for the time being, and then try switching the desktop back to xubuntu after a few weeks of updates.

Just a thought...

[Arylon]

If you can open a terminal, try launching your applications from it, rather than the gui. I've got regular Ubuntu here, but every time an app quits without warning, it will put useful info back to the command line, but only if it was launched from the command line to begin with.

[Leslie Viljoen]

It's the infamous segmentation fault problem. You'll see that the apps you are trying to run will give you a "segmentation fault" if you run them in a terminal. I was able to fix the problem by recompiling the affected packages.

So there are two known solutions:
1. Get recompiled packages or recompile them yourself
2. Try Debian

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we have documented this problem (and solutions) here:
http://www.ppclinux.info/wiki/maclin/Ubuntu_Kubuntu_and_Xubuntu

Look under "known issues". We also have a page for Debian, and a "known issue matrix" that might be helpful in surveying what problems you might encounter when choosing a distribution.

Les

[Leslie Viljoen]

BTW: I'm going to move the packages to www.ppclinux.info too. This should make downloading easier, and I'm also going to try and set up a repository on that server so that installing fixed packages is as seamless as possible.

[Leslie Viljoen]

Ok, I have attempted to add a repository to our ppclinux server. Can someone please help to test it?

You need to go to Synaptic:
-> Settings -> Repositories -> Third-Party Software -> Add

..and add the following APT line:
deb http://www.ppclinux.info/repo binary/


Then update, and see if you can install the updated xfdesktop and thunar packages. Let me know how it goes!

[Leslie Viljoen]

If you do try and add my repository, you might need to add my public key to your keyring to verify that it was really me that made the packages.

This is how to do that:
wget -q http://www.ppclinux.info/repo/leslieviljoen-key.gpg -O - |sudo apt-key add -

If anyone tries the repository please give me feedback on what you had to do and how it went. I want to try and make it as easy as possible to put Xubuntu in a working state.