No icons in desktop, can't open any folders (nautilus)

[tokico]

Hi!

I updated today to 9.04 and after a couple of reboots, Nautilus just stopped working. It shows no icons in the desktop and I can not open any folders. If I open it using the console, it gives me the following error (as a normal user or as root):

GLib-ERROR **: /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.20.1/glib/gmem.c:156: failed to allocate 1073741824 bytes
aborting...

Could somebody please help me?
Many thanks, tokico.

[tokico]

Would it be a Glib problem?

[manuelb]

Interesting as it's trying to allocate exactly 1 gigabyte of memory, i wonder if it's trying to build a preview of some gigantic jpg picture? Does gconf-editor start?!

[tokico]

Interesting as it's trying to allocate exactly 1 gigabyte of memory, i wonder if it's trying to build a preview of some gigantic jpg picture? Does gconf-editor start?!

Yes it does. I have not got such a big file in my desktop or in my home folder. And I only have 512 MB of RAM (1.5 GB of swap, though).

[manuelb]

Ok, so we may resolve it in one go, now let's paste here the output of this CLI command:

gconftool -g /apps/nautilus/preferences/thumbnail_limit

I bet it say 1 Gb, so we are going to lower it a bit for your system, i guess 10Mb should be fine for any thumbnail you would have to preview

[manuelb]

What's the output of that command?

[manuelb]

I got to go now, in case you could try to set a lower value for images to get thumbnailed: start gconf-editor, browse to /apps/nautilus/preferences/thumbnail_limit and change the value to 10485760 (10mb) then restart it.
I don't know if that could resolve it but better try simple things first!

[delectomorfo]

I have the exact same problem, and I did what you suggested about changing the thumbnail size. Did not work. Any ideas?

[tokico]

what's the output of that command?

10485760. 10 mb.

[manuelb]

Try to run this:

strace -o out.txt nautilus

Then open the generated out.txt and put it here.