I removed all but Desktop Icons, Ubuntu AppIndicators and Ubuntu Dock, rebooted and then reproduced the issue. Luckily I’ve found one way to reproduce this, albeit somewhat convoluted and still a bit unreliable, involving Synaptic and window tiling. And as it doesn’t seem to trigger the issue when using another account, I’m now working through settings differences between the two in hopes of finding something crucial.

While doing so, I did discover that dconf-editor is similarly affected:

    touko 12 16:09:32 saegusa gnome-shell[8208]: WL: compositor bug: The compositor tried to use an object from one client in a 'wl_pointer.enter' for a different client.
    touko 12 16:09:32 saegusa gnome-shell[8208]: WL: error in client communication (pid 12364)
    touko 12 16:09:32 saegusa dconf-editor[12364]: Error reading events from display: Katkennut putki
    touko 12 16:09:32 saegusa boinc[2098]: No protocol specified
    touko 12 16:09:32 saegusa boinc[2098]: No protocol specified
    touko 12 16:09:33 saegusa boinc[2098]: No protocol specified
    touko 12 16:09:33 saegusa boinc[2098]: No protocol specified
    touko 12 16:09:34 saegusa gnome-shell[8208]: WL: compositor bug: The compositor tried to use an object from one client in a 'wl_pointer.enter' for a different client.
    touko 12 16:09:34 saegusa boinc[2098]: No protocol specified
    touko 12 16:09:34 saegusa boinc[2098]: No protocol specified
    touko 12 16:09:34 saegusa gnome-shell[8208]: WL: error in client communication (pid 12796)
    touko 12 16:09:34 saegusa gnome-terminal-[12796]: Error reading events from display: Katkennut putki
    touko 12 16:09:34 saegusa systemd[3569]: gnome-terminal-server.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
    touko 12 16:09:34 saegusa systemd[3569]: gnome-terminal-server.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
    touko 12 16:09:34 saegusa systemd[3569]: vte-spawn-da1941e8-60e5-48e5-868b-7348dd1158c7.scope: Succeeded.
    touko 12 16:09:34 saegusa gnome-shell[8208]: Error adding children to desktop: this.layout.get_child_at(...) is null
    touko 12 16:09:34 saegusa gnome-shell[8208]: Error adding children to desktop: this.layout.get_child_at(...) is null
    touko 12 16:09:34 saegusa gnome-shell[8208]: Error adding children to desktop: this.layout.get_child_at(...) is null
    touko 12 16:09:34 saegusa gnome-shell[8208]: Error adding children to desktop: this.layout.get_child_at(...) is null

Looks like dconf-editor did not exit with FAILURE, but the dconf-editor window did disappear just as Gnome terminal’s did.

I’ve hit an issue, which I believe I’ve now isolated to have come from upgrading fontconfig (and related packages) from 2.12.6-0ubuntu2 to 2.12.6-0ubuntu2.3 from -proposed: if I start Firefox and afterwards start Gparted or Synaptic, Firefox starts eating up all of my CPU. Eventually all letters in the Gparted/Synaptic UI turn into boxes.

Syslog typically then says something like below:

Dec 4 13:41:50 saegusa synaptic.desktop[30027]: (synaptic:30028): Pango-WARNING **: 13:41:50.995: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is ’DejaVu Sans 11′
Dec 4 13:41:50 saegusa synaptic.desktop[30027]: (synaptic:30028): Pango-WARNING **: 13:41:50.995: font_face status is: out of memory
Dec 4 13:41:50 saegusa synaptic.desktop[30027]: (synaptic:30028): Pango-WARNING **: 13:41:50.995: scaled_font status is: out of memory
Dec 4 13:41:50 saegusa synaptic.desktop[30027]: (synaptic:30028): Pango-WARNING **: 13:41:50.995: shaping failure, expect ugly output. shape-engine=’PangoFcShapeEngine’, font=’DejaVu Sans 11′, text=’Päivitä’
Dec 4 13:41:51 saegusa synaptic.desktop[30027]: (synaptic:30028): Pango-WARNING **: 13:41:51.007: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is ’DejaVu Sans 11’
Dec 4 13:41:51 saegusa synaptic.desktop[30027]: (synaptic:30028): Pango-WARNING **: 13:41:51.007: font_face status is: out of memory
Dec 4 13:41:51 saegusa synaptic.desktop[30027]: (synaptic:30028): Pango-WARNING **: 13:41:51.007: scaled_font status is: out of memory

The computer has 32 GB of memory and there’s plenty still usable when this occurs, so the OOM seems incorrect to me.

To be sure, I rolled back entirely from -proposed (which caused the issue to go away), then re-enabled -proposed and upgraded just fontconfig, and the issue reappeared.

Thanks, I can confirm that all the windows I posted screenshots of above now have maximizers in Quantal. The package downloading window (which I only mentioned) also had one, but there was one still missing it: the ’Applying Changes’ window. That one also sometimes gets quite a bit of content with the ’Details’ pseudo terminal. I didn’t post a screenshot of it above, I’ll do so now below with Synaptic 0.75.12build1 running in a VM.

Also, I did notice that the maximizers were missing from all of the fixed windows too when running Gnome Classic (No Effects). But I guess that’s going the way of the dinosaurs anyway so it probably doesn’t matter. With Gnome Classic (without ”No Effects”) the maximizers were there, as with LXDE and Xfce. (Non-fallback Gnome 3 was misbehaving too much to be able to tell either way.)

>Lock version is not as clever as it sounds. It’s supposed to >do what it says on the tin, lock the version… But it only >locks it within Synaptic. Anything else that does package >upgrades (read: Update Manager, apt-get, aptitude, etc) >ignores this. (That’s supposed to be a blockquote, I but it doesn’t seem to work.)

There are many windows that would benefit from having the maximize button available but don’t. I produced snapshots of the history window, the ’Downloading Package Information’ window and the ’Mark additional required changes’ window. IIRC, the downloading packages and installing packages windows are also affected, though I couldn’t produce snapshots of those right now without installing sh… numerous packages I don’t want. Software sources is also affected, I guess that should be marked separately.

All these windows tend to have huge listings in them, and scrolling through those listings in cramped space is difficult. They’re already resizable (as they should be), so why not allow easy maximizing as well?

Seems to happen every time I update package listings now, right after all downloads have finished. It doesn’t prevent upgrading however, because if I restart Synaptic after the crash, all the listing updates have been applied and downloading the upgraded packages doesn’t crash Synaptic.

Bug #904853 is related: for a i386 package installed with –force-architecture on an amd64 system, the Synaptic symptom is the same (”The list of installed files is only available for installed packages” ). The info files in /var/lib/dpkg/info don’t have a :i386 in the filename, as (I’m guessing) Synaptic figures for an :i386 package they should.

jani@saegusa:tmp$ ls /var/lib/dpkg/info/lightscribe*
/var/lib/dpkg/info/lightscribe.conffiles /var/lib/dpkg/info/lightscribe.list /var/lib/dpkg/info/lightscribe.postinst

This also concerns libsane 1.0.22-7ubuntu1 here. I don’t think this is Bug #904853, as I’ve not installed these packages manually, although I can’t vouch if –force-acrchitecture is used automatically by some upgrades.

I had plugged in my phone via USB (as a mass memory device), after which Nautilus and Miro crashed. I was trying to send a report from Miro when this occurred. Other GUI apps running at the time were Synaptic, Chromium and Transmission.

There are lots of reports with this title already, but they are all from pre-11.10 era, and I believe there’s a bot that’ll tell me if this is a duplicate so no harm done if it is.

Actually, scratch that: I can’t reproduce this with those steps. Instead, when I mark to upgrade a package that causes removals, those removals become ’auto removables’ when I cancel the upgrade.