picasa 3 always starts with error: crash id: 47eb27550f497caf

[FangQ]

This has been bothering me for over a year. I submitted crash reports
a couple of times, but nothing happened since.

Every time I start picasa 3, it always gives me an error message. My
latest crash report id is 47eb27550f497caf.

Just to get feedback from other users, I also uploaded the crash
reports to the following URL:

http://bbs.dartmouth.edu/~fangq/blog/upload/Picasa_100320-144101.dat
http://bbs.dartmouth.edu/~fangq/blog/upload/Picasa_100320-144101.dmp

hope someone can make sense of it and tell me what to do.

thanks

[mjt]

On Mar 20, 1:44 pm, FangQ <fan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This has been bothering me for over a year. I submitted crash reports
> a couple of times, but nothing happened since.
>
> Every time I start picasa 3, it always gives me an error message. My
> latest crash report id is 47eb27550f497caf.

Have your tried from a CLI (command line interface)?

Here's what I'd try (at a CLI window):

user@machine~:> cd /opt/google/picasa/3.0/bin/
user@machine:/opt/google/picasa/3.0/bin> export PIC_BINDIR="/opt/
google/picasa/3.0/bin"
user@machine:/opt/google/picasa/3.0/bin> (WINE_DEBUG=1 "$PIC_BINDIR"/
wrapper license.exe.so /gate "c:\Program Files\Google
\Picasa3\Picasa3.exe")

That last command might wrap here in groups,
so be sure you type the whole command between
the parentheses () and including the parentheses.
(copy-n-paste would be easier)

See any other messages?

[FangQ]

On Mar 22, 3:16 pm, mjt <myswt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 20, 1:44 pm, FangQ <fan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > This has been bothering me for over a year. I submitted crash reports
> > a couple of times, but nothing happened since.
>
> > Every time I start picasa 3, it always gives me an error message. My
> > latest crash report id is 47eb27550f497caf.
>
> Have your tried from a CLI (command line interface)?
>
> Here's what I'd try (at a CLI window):
>
> user@machine~:> cd  /opt/google/picasa/3.0/bin/
> user@machine:/opt/google/picasa/3.0/bin>   export PIC_BINDIR="/opt/
> google/picasa/3.0/bin"
> user@machine:/opt/google/picasa/3.0/bin>  (WINE_DEBUG=1 "$PIC_BINDIR"/
> wrapper license.exe.so  /gate "c:\Program Files\Google
> \Picasa3\Picasa3.exe")

I tried your commands, they returned to shell with no error messages,
however, the launched Picasa window still pop up the previous message.

(I guess the wrapper is only responsible up to the point of launching
the Picasa3.exe binary, but it does not handle any error inside
Picasa3.exe. This is clearly a picasa binary error, not the launcher
script.)

[FangQ]

after trying different things, I finally figured out the error was due
to the presence of a few Chinese named folders.

The folders was named in GBK (cp936) encoding (which is the default
encoding for Chinese for Windows) as was copied from windows
partition. I am using zh.CN_UTF-8 locale in Ubuntu, so it shows as
garbled text in my file explorer (however, it doesn't crash).
Unfortunately, Picasa 3 seems not able to handle this and crash every
single time when it starts to scan this folder (and sadly, the scan
starts every time).

This should be easy to duplicate and I wish it can be fixed in the
next release (whenever it will be).

[mhenriday]

FangQ, I have several Chinese-language and Japanese-language folders
on the HDD under the Images folder on my 64-bit Ubuntu Karmic setup.
Picasa 3.6 does not crash when loading, nor does it have any problem
displaying these folders. I don't know if the difference between my
experience and yours could be due to the fact that in my case, the
folder titles were assigned using SCIM on Ubuntu, rather than the
Windows IME....

Henri

[FangQ]

On Mar 27, 6:27 am, mhenriday <mhenri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> FangQ, I have several Chinese-language and Japanese-language folders
> on the HDD under the Images folder on my 64-bit Ubuntu Karmic setup.
> Picasa 3.6 does not crash when loading, nor does it have any problem
> displaying these folders. I don't know if the difference between my
> experience and yours could be due to the fact that in my case, the
> folder titles were assigned using SCIM on Ubuntu, rather than the
> Windows IME....

I totally agree with you that a well-encoded Chinese folder/file name
will be no problem to Picasa. However, as I said in my previous
email, the folder name are encoded in GBK (cp936), thus, these
names are not valid UTF-8 strings (assuming your locale is in UTF-8).

here is something you can test. Run the following command
under the search path of your picasa:

mkdir `echo "照片" | iconv -f utf-8 -t gbk`

it will look like "��Ƭ". Then copy a few photons into this
folder. Launch picasa and see what happen.

let me know if this example is sufficient to illustrate the problem.

(I know GTK uses G_BROKEN_FILENAMES to set up
a fall-back locale when a broken filename is detected, but
not sure if picasa has this mechanism)

[mhenriday]

FangQ, I don't doubt that your description of the problem is spot on.
What I wonder is if you boot into your Linux distro, temporarily
assign West European file names to these files, open Picasa and there
change the file names back to (UTF-8) Chinese, will this suffice to
resolve the problem you are seeing....

Henri