X is randomly crashing when i start a new application

[apatters]

I recently picked up a new Acer Aspire V3 and installed Xubuntu 13.04 64-bit. Everything ran smoothly for the first week or so but now I'm getting random crashes that kick me back to the login screen without any error or warning.

Here are the dmesg errors generated by the last two crashes:

[ 732.738296] xfce4-session[8625]: segfault at ffffffff00000000 ip 00007f87f0a15f7f sp 00007fff5d920e90 error 5 in libglib-2.0.so.0.3600.0[7f87f09b2000+f9000]
[ 1051.854764] xfce4-session[5927]: segfault at ffffffff00000000 ip 00007f43d9cb5f7f sp 00007fff2b686f40 error 5 in libglib-2.0.so.0.3600.0[7f43d9c52000+f9000]

I've stopped xfwm4 from loading at startup and instead load xmonad.

Can anyone give me a hand and/or suggest what else I should be doing and what info I should be looking at? I found a bug in the Arch database where a similar error message comes up (https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/34980). They suggest downgrading libglib-2.0... I have no idea how to do that under Ubuntu.

Thanks!

[DeathByDenim]

Well, I think you are right. The bug has also been reported to Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xfce4-session/+bug/1172018
Though they claim is has been fixed upstream, there don't appear to be any workarounds mentioned there.

As to downgrading libglib-2.0, you can try downloading an earlier version here:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal-updates/libglib2.0-0
That's the package for Ubuntu 12.10. You might run into some dependency trouble, but it's worth a shot. You can also choose even older versions for 12.04 (precise).

[Toz]

Have a read through bug report #1104435 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xfce4-session/+bug/1104435). The patched xfce4-session is currently in raring-proposed. More information on using the proposed repository can be found here (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed).

That bug report also references a PPA (see post #19) that you can use to install the patched version of that package.

[apatters]

Very helpful replies thanks guys. I installed the patched xfce4-session from the PPA in bug #1104435, I'll leave a comment there with the outcome after using it for a while.

The comment describing the bugfix recommends that you also install ppa-purge so that you can remove the fix if needed. However I was unable to do that.


$ sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
ppa-purge
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded.
Need to get 5,704 B of archives.
After this operation, 45.1 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://ppa.launchpad.net/nilarimogard/webupd8/ubuntu/ raring/main ppa-purge all 0.2.8+bzr57 [5,704 B]
Fetched 5,778 B in 1s (4,541 B/s)
Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/nilarimogard/webupd8/ubuntu/pool/main/p/ppa-purge/ppa-purge_0.2.8+bzr57_all.deb Size mismatch
E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?


I tried an apt-get update which did not resolve the issue.

I know there is some sort of conflict here with the webupd8 ppa but I don't understand enough about aptitude to understand more than that.

What would be the way to resolve this conflict and get ppa-purge installed on my system?

Thanks!

[Toz]

Try:

sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update -f
sudo apt-get update --fix-missing

[apatters]

Worked like a charm! The fix to xfce-session seems to have worked as well.

Thanks guys!