Caja with dropbox, antivirus problem -- infinite Starting Caja

Support & Help Requests
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#1

I’ve set up my 5th Ubuntu-Mate 16.04 system yesterday and ran into an unexpected problem. Everything was fine at the initial reboot so I started installing updates and some extra software for my wife. When I rebooted I was greeted with a nasty “Starting Caja…” endless loop filling up the bottom taskbar :frowning:
Eventually I was able to sudo killall caja to stop it, but then caja wouldn’t launch.

Remembering the only two things I’d added for her that I didn’t for myself, I removed caja-dropbox and caja started working. Thought I was done and shut down for the night.

Rebooted this morning and sure enough the caja starting loop was going again. Another, this time more difficult, sudo killall caja stopped it. So I removed antivirus from Software Boutique. This got caja working again and after this I wasn’t met with the starting caja loop after I rebooted.

Don’t know what is really going on here but I’d like to point out the issue and my solution that might provide a clue, or help others with the same problem.

I ran into this starting caja loop when I initially tried Ubuntu Mate 14.04 on top of Ubuntu 14.04 which made me ignore Mate until I tried 15.10 in anticipation of 16.04, having found nothing that would be a suitable replacement for the old Ubuntu 10.04 systems we’d been using to great success.

Welcome and Boutique Daily Builds
Mate desktop launches infinite file manager windows on startup
Caja starts multible instances after login
#2

I can confirm this problem. Caja was caught in an endless loop opening up infinite instances of itself. It appeared after I have installed Alarm Clock and Antiviral through the Software Boutique. It is not related to Dropbox in my case. I de-installed both programs while Caja was going crazy. Luckily, this reversed the process and the nearly 100 Caja instances closed one by one. Never saw anything like it. I immediately backed up everything and re-installed my entire system.

#3

I’m guessing this happens under MATE 1.12 (16.04 default). Version can be checked under System → About MATE.

I installed and configured a super-minimal MATE virtual machine using the mini ISO the other day, at one point I too had an infinite number of “Starting Caja…” opening at the bottom. Some process went crazy, I can’t recall what I did or how I stopped it, but I think killall caja did the trick. :confused:

I would bet it’s something to do with the extensions for Caja.

#4

Thanks for reporting guys. Sounds like Antiviral is the cause, although I’ve not experienced this myself. More test feedback for Antiviral would be appreciated. If it is proven to be the issue, weay have to drop it.

#5

Thanks for the feedback. I’ll give caja-dropbox another try since it would seem antivirus may be the real culprit here, and caja-dropbox could be really helpful to my wife it works.

So far she has really liked Ubuntu-Mate.

I’ll follow-up if the problem returns with caja-dropbox install.

#6

I can confirm that I have also run into this issue. Uninstalling the antivirus solved the issue.

#7

I believe it’s a bug in Caja. I can re-produce it both 1.12 and 1.14, and these systems never had Antiviral installed:

killall caja && caja

So if the Antiviral extension is re-spawning Caja, this could be why it’s happening.

#8

I had this problem as well. I also fixed with sudo killall caja and the removal of antiviral.
I would really like to reinstall antiviral, Can anyone tell me a way to do this without the dreaded Caja loop?

#9

To restart Caja you do the following:

caja -q
#10

Cheers mate! Thanks for your reply and a big thanks to you, for all your work and dedication with this amazing distro. I am a newbie to linux. I came from osx / ios and was attracted to linux because it reminded me of the versatility i would get with a jailbroken ios device. When i found UMate 15.04 and UUMate last year i was so happy to finally have a desktop that worked the way i wanted it to work looked awesome and didn’t break when i added to it! I have since proudly started calling this community home:wedding:

All this being said, i have tried well over 100 distros and Ubuntu Mate shines far brighter than the rest and if i am to be totally honest there isn’t a close second.

Thanks again for your reply. This community is blessed to have a leader like you :joy:

2 Likes
#11

Thank you for the kind words :slight_smile:️

1 Like
#12

I don’t know whether there has been an update to Caja in the past couple of months - but I had the same ‘infinite loop starting Caja’ experience after installing the antiviral app in Software Boutique. I originally wanted the AV because I interface with Windows machines on our network. Uninstalling AV solved the infinite loop problem; but I still wanted AV capability.

Just recently I was able to install Sophos AV successfully, after seeing that it worked well on another machine running Ubuntu Unity. I don’t know whether the more recent success is due to using a different AV, or due to some update to Caja. But I’m well satisfied with SAV and it hasn’t negatively impacted the performance of my 5-yr-old i5 Thinkpad. Perhaps this will work on some other machines. Thanks for a great forum!

2 Likes
#13

Just for info for any Linux noobs out there, anyone that wants an AV app that works in Ubuntu without any hassle, see the link below:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ClamAV

See also:

#14

OK, so this is happening again. I installed Clam antivirus and it broke Caja. Every time I boot, Caja opens 9,999 incidences and crashes the machine.
I uninstalled and purged ClamAV, which didn’t change anything. Whatever changes it made to Caja are still in effect. I downloaded and installed xfce from cli so that I could have a working system and then tried every solution I could find on the internet. Mostly changes to caja.desktop. Nothing has worked so far. Does anyone remember what this bug specifically did to caja from a few years back? I can’t use mate until I figure this out…

#15

Have you tried reconfiguring caja?

sudo dpkg-reconfigure caja

#16

An alternative to ClamAv:

Bitdefender antivirus scanner
https://www.bitdefender.com/media/html/en/unicesportal/

Two years ago I installed it on Ubuntu14.04 and now I installed it on 16.04 (Virtual machine).
These are the 64-bit commands:

sudo sh -c ‘echo “deb http://download.bitdefender.com/repos/deb/ bitdefender non-free” >> /etc/apt/sources.list’
wget http://download.bitdefender.com/repos/deb/bd.key.asc
sudo apt-key add bd.key.asc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bitdefender-scanner-gui
sudo touch /opt/BitDefender-scanner/var/lib/scan/bdcore.so.linux-x86_64
sudo ln -fs /opt/BitDefender-scanner/var/lib/scan/bdcore.so.linux-x86_64 /opt/BitDefender-scanner/var/lib/scan/bdcore.so

Restart

Then after reboot, you open BitDefender and click UPDATE to update the malware signatures.
Within 30 days you will need to obtain a free license by sending your email (and name)

The license lasts one year.

This is the forum where I got the commands (in italian, use google translate and if you do not understand something, ask me)

I had no problem , I use Bitdefender for the files I transfer to Windows, and sometimes for home.