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Calibre crashes Mate desktop..

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The Natural Philosopher

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Nov 7, 2012, 3:44:14 PM11/7/12
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I have an NFS mounted virtual drive and if I use Calibre to export a
book, the desktop crashes - the export works but all the mate panels
vanish. It also destroys the sound settings on the computer.

Any idea where to begin to find out what is happening and who to report
it to?



--
Ineptocracy

(in-ep-toc’-ra-cy) – a system of government where the least capable to
lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the
members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are
rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a
diminishing number of producers.

GangGreene

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Nov 7, 2012, 5:26:04 PM11/7/12
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On Wed, 07 Nov 2012 20:44:14 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> I have an NFS mounted virtual drive and if I use Calibre to export a
> book, the desktop crashes - the export works but all the mate panels
> vanish. It also destroys the sound settings on the computer.
>
> Any idea where to begin to find out what is happening and who to report
> it to?

Call the helpdesk or support.

The Natural Philosopher

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Nov 7, 2012, 6:47:33 PM11/7/12
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Très drôle

;-(

GangGreene

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Nov 7, 2012, 7:02:57 PM11/7/12
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On Wed, 07 Nov 2012 23:47:33 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 07/11/12 22:26, GangGreene wrote:
>> On Wed, 07 Nov 2012 20:44:14 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> I have an NFS mounted virtual drive and if I use Calibre to export a
>>> book, the desktop crashes - the export works but all the mate panels
>>> vanish. It also destroys the sound settings on the computer.
>>>
>>> Any idea where to begin to find out what is happening and who to
>>> report it to?
>>
>> Call the helpdesk or support.
>>
> Très drôle
>
> ;-(

You do want to save keystrokes don't you?

The Natural Philosopher

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Nov 8, 2012, 4:03:58 AM11/8/12
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No. I want to understand what is happening when a desktop crashes and why,.

J G Miller

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Nov 8, 2012, 11:03:30 AM11/8/12
to
On Wednesday, November 7th, 2012, at 20:44:14h +0000,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> I have an NFS mounted virtual drive and if I use Calibre to export a
> book, the desktop crashes - the export works but all the mate panels
> vanish. It also destroys the sound settings on the computer.

When you say your desktop crashes, does the Xsession crash as well?

And does Calibre itself crash?

My uninformed guess (knowing nothing about Calibre) would be that
something in Calibre is either causing the Xorg server to crash
(if that is happening) but if not, and the more likely thing, is
maybe it is causing something nasty to happen to dbus which then
causes the MATE desktop to crash.

You could try running calibre from the command line in a terminal
and look to see if there are any error or warning messages just
prior to it causing the desktop to crash.

Another test to try is to startup your Xsession in failsafe mode
(just a terminal with no desktop/window manager running or
anything else) and try running Calibre from that and see
if it complains about dbus not running. If so, then you
could then start dbus manually and again try running Calibre
and check for error and warning messages when doing an export.

James Moe

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Nov 8, 2012, 11:14:20 AM11/8/12
to
On 11/07/2012 01:44 PM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
> Any idea where to begin to find out what is happening and who to report
> it to?
>
You could try here <https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bugs>.
But do not expect much from the developer. Calibre stopped working on
my Gnome desktop, it gets hung somewhere and nothing ever becomes
visible; the Calibre processes have to be killed.
The developer's response was (paraphrased): Tough shit; I don't care
about linux.
(See defect report <https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1033689>.)

--
James Moe
jmm-list at sohnen-moe dot com

GangGreene

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Nov 8, 2012, 11:25:37 AM11/8/12
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On Thu, 08 Nov 2012 09:03:58 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 08/11/12 00:02, GangGreene wrote:
>> On Wed, 07 Nov 2012 23:47:33 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> On 07/11/12 22:26, GangGreene wrote:
>>>> On Wed, 07 Nov 2012 20:44:14 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I have an NFS mounted virtual drive and if I use Calibre to export a
>>>>> book, the desktop crashes - the export works but all the mate panels
>>>>> vanish. It also destroys the sound settings on the computer.
>>>>>
>>>>> Any idea where to begin to find out what is happening and who to
>>>>> report it to?
>>>>
>>>> Call the helpdesk or support.
>>>>
>>> Très drôle
>>>
>>> ;-(
>>
>> You do want to save keystrokes don't you?
>>
> No. I want to understand what is happening when a desktop crashes and
> why,.

Oh I see jump on me for wanting to get to a bottom of a problem and
telling me to call the helpdesk, but it then is not good for you.

Thanks for treating everyone the same.

The Natural Philosopher

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Nov 8, 2012, 3:46:10 PM11/8/12
to
On 08/11/12 16:03, J G Miller wrote:
> On Wednesday, November 7th, 2012, at 20:44:14h +0000,
> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> I have an NFS mounted virtual drive and if I use Calibre to export a
>> book, the desktop crashes - the export works but all the mate panels
>> vanish. It also destroys the sound settings on the computer.
>
> When you say your desktop crashes, does the Xsession crash as well?
>
No..I dont think so. leastways I dont end up staring at a console.

> And does Calibre itself crash?
>

Well it did ONCE. Mostly it finishes the job it was doing, but then of
course I cant close it..


> My uninformed guess (knowing nothing about Calibre) would be that
> something in Calibre is either causing the Xorg server to crash
> (if that is happening) but if not, and the more likely thing, is
> maybe it is causing something nasty to happen to dbus which then
> causes the MATE desktop to crash.
>
> You could try running calibre from the command line in a terminal
> and look to see if there are any error or warning messages just
> prior to it causing the desktop to crash.
>

THAT is something I should have thought of..

> Another test to try is to startup your Xsession in failsafe mode
> (just a terminal with no desktop/window manager running or
> anything else) and try running Calibre from that and see
> if it complains about dbus not running. If so, then you
> could then start dbus manually and again try running Calibre
> and check for error and warning messages when doing an export.
>
Ok...

The Natural Philosopher

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Nov 8, 2012, 3:50:51 PM11/8/12
to
yerrs. Its actually a pretty good program and would be much better if it
wasn't written in snakevenom or whatever it is.

But its one man's effort and that's a big ask of one person

The Natural Philosopher

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Nov 8, 2012, 3:51:30 PM11/8/12
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I never told you to call a helpdesk.

The Natural Philosopher

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Nov 9, 2012, 7:29:28 AM11/9/12
to
In case anyone is interested it seems to be something to do with a clash
between calibre and dbus, and dbus crashes if calibre attempts to put a
notification in the pane area.

Since its not the only way to crash dbus*, it seems the basic dbus
software (or its python support libs) has issues.

The work around is to tell calibre to leave dbus alone and not out
little icons in the panes.


*googling for the same error message gave me hit on other apps that
crash it,.

J G Miller

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Nov 9, 2012, 8:43:48 AM11/9/12
to
On Friday, November 9th, 2012, at 12:29:28h +0000,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> In case anyone is interested it seems to be something to do with a clash
> between calibre and dbus, and dbus crashes if calibre attempts to put a
> notification in the pane area.

Aha, so my suspicion was in fact correct.

> Since its not the only way to crash dbus*, it seems the basic dbus
> software (or its python support libs) has issues.

I suppose if you were prepared to dig deeper, you could see if there
is a dbg package for dbus, and run dbus from gdb to see if you can find
where the actual crash (maybe a segmentation violation) is happening
and then submit a meaningful bug report which would hopefully get
fixed for the benefit of the community.

The Natural Philosopher

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Nov 9, 2012, 9:39:15 AM11/9/12
to
It appears that other people are already on the case and doing it better
than I could.

I also noted a new bit of dbus arrived with a wedge of other updates today..

In my time running IT businesses I learnt:

- not to waste my time fussing with details that others were well
capable of handling.
- never to go into anything further than was required to achieve the
desired result.

The last is a lesson many people should note: there is more to learn
than you will ever in a lifetime be able to assimilate. IF your purpose
is the pragmatic achievement of pragmatic objectives, you will slow
yourself down by e.g. delving into the materials science of wheel
bearings, when any mechanic will tell you that Brand B always fail in
5,000 miles whereas brand A lasts for ever.

Of course if your pragmatic purpose is to haunt usenet and hold court to
people who you hope will prostrate themselves at you guru like feet
because you are the One True Person who actually RTFMed.... Then that's
another matter :-)

J G Miller

unread,
Nov 9, 2012, 11:56:21 AM11/9/12
to
On Friday, November 9th, 2012, at 14:39:15h +0000,
The Natural Philosopher advised:

> In my time running IT businesses I learnt:
>
> - not to waste my time fussing with details that others were well
> capable of handling.
> - never to go into anything further than was required to achieve the
> desired result.

And why not add "do not waste time on Usenet trying to answer
other people's questions or help them with their problem"?

The Natural Philosopher

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Nov 9, 2012, 1:13:50 PM11/9/12
to
When I was in business doing IT I never touched usenet OR the web,.. No
time.

Now I am retired I can play a little...

James Moe

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Nov 9, 2012, 4:51:45 PM11/9/12
to
On 11/08/2012 01:50 PM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> The developer's response was (paraphrased): Tough shit; I don't care
>> about linux.
>> (See defect report <https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1033689>.)
>>
> yerrs. Its actually a pretty good program and would be much better if it
> wasn't written in snakevenom or whatever it is.
>
It works well enough in win-xp. If you have a virtual machine
available, that is an option.

The Natural Philosopher

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Nov 9, 2012, 5:33:58 PM11/9/12
to
I do but I restrict it to ONLY those programs that I have to use that
don't run at all in Linux.

Esssentially Corel graphics and RhinoCAD.

cipher

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Feb 3, 2013, 6:35:13 AM2/3/13
to
On Fri, 09 Nov 2012 12:29:28 +0000, The Natural Philosopher Inscribed upon
the Golden Tablets of Usenet thusly:

> The work around is to tell calibre to leave dbus alone and not out
> little icons in the panes.

And how did you accomplish this?



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The Natural Philosopher

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Feb 3, 2013, 7:00:06 AM2/3/13
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On 03/02/13 11:35, cipher wrote:
> On Fri, 09 Nov 2012 12:29:28 +0000, The Natural Philosopher Inscribed upon
> the Golden Tablets of Usenet thusly:
>
>> The work around is to tell calibre to leave dbus alone and not out
>> little icons in the panes.
>
> And how did you accomplish this?
>
I didn't.
It still crashes :-(

on the very few occasions I use it to convert books, I just reboot the
desktop and reinstall all the panel items that have been trashed.

Its just part of the workload of using calibre. I dont use it enough to
bother to probe further. Life is too short.

Like the happy hours spent trying to work out why some Ubuntu upgrade
(to upstart I think) totally prevented my machine from acquiring DHCP so
it came up with no networking at all.. when suddenly by converting it (I
think) to static IP etc and then going back to dynamic, has restored
sanity...sigh.

One has (perhaps misplaced) faith that someone somewhere will get the
bug report and fix it later..

And if you think that's the issue with free code, think again. I could
tell you of the installation of an old version of Quark on OSX (old, but
legal) that simply refused to start...and the total lack of support from
Quark, and the hours spent trawling the net until finally a chance
remark that 'this may be due to corrupted files in XYZ directory' led me
to actually CREATE XYZ directory - a thing the installation had failed
to do, whereupon it all sprang to life..


sigh...
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