Cryptic error reported on every startup of MATE

Support & Help Requests
1

I have just begun to familiarize myself with Ubuntu MATE after installing it on an ASUS K50I laptop I had laying around.

I am not a newbie to programming, operating systems and shell scripts but I lack a deep specific knowledge of Linux (having written UNIX shell scripts in the early 90's I am getting back some of the long dormant knowledge.)

I have a nice desktop set up and have today managed to print successfully to my XEROX laser printer. Yesterday I got a test program to connect to a FTDI USB/ComPort adapter but as of yet can't get it to be recognized by moserial.

A day or so ago I observed a problem upon Mate startup:

Ubuntu Mate Start Error
Ubuntu Mate Start Error467×165 15.8 KB

Naturally I clicked on "Report Problem" the first time but since this comes up every time I start MATE now I hit cancel and it disappears from the desktop. Things appear to go normally from then on but I really wouldn't know given my current experience with MATE.

So the error pops up unceremoniously leaving no diagnostic reference to what caused it.

My system has no real content of my own creation as of yet so I am tempted to get out my install cd with the .iso on it and rerun install. This leaves me with an important question to be answered by someone out in the user world. I considered doing a backup but the only files of value are in Downloads from the manufacturers of the printer and USB device.

I don't really want to lose my printer setup and my USB/ComPort driver/installs. It took quite a bit of effort to get them working.

If I do a reinstall will it offer me a "Repair" option and leave my driver alone? I believe the FTDI copied some stuff to a .lib directory or come such thing. For all I know the XEROX install process may have done the same.

2

I ran into this problem the first time I set up Ubuntu MATE. This helped me:

Hope this helps.

Jaymo

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3

You didn't provide any specifics for that to be answered; Yes you can non-destructively re-install if using a release that uses the ubiquity installer (up to 23.10) or calamares (18.10 on) but only if using the ubuntu-desktop-installer for releases for 23.04 & 23.10; but Ubuntu-MATE didn't start using ubuntu-desktop-installer until 24.04; so release matters here.

I did two re-installs of 24.04 yesterday because of a problem; but that was with a Ubuntu 24.04 LTS flavor that used the calamares installer & not Ubuntu-MATE (which uses ubuntu-desktop-installer). If I'd wanted to use Ubuntu-MATE 22.04 LTS that would have worked; alas I didn't want 22.04.

I have no idea what you mean by that; I re-installed because of package issues, but used a non-destructive re-install as I didn't want to lose any of my files, nor have to re-install my manually installed (ie. those I added to the system) packages manually. As the install method erased system directories (thus fixing the issue I was having!), I did lose my altered /etc/hosts, /etc/fstab & other minor configs; but those take seconds for me to resolve, so I don't care about that... Other configs (of mine) I use exist in /usr/local/bin/ but that's not touched via re-install.

Your printer setup maybe safe from re-install (depending on what exactly was changed) OR erased as my changes in /etc/ directory were lost... as where & how they were done will impact this, plus the release mentioned earlier.

For more details on the install method I'm talking about you can refer to an answer here

As for System Program Problem Detected, chances are it's a consequence of a .crash file in /var/crash, and your system will pull up that question whenever that file is detected. If you upload the report, an extra file (or two) should be created with the .upload and/or .uploaded at the end of the filename (instead of .crash). If the .uploaded file is present; you shouldn't see any popup.

So if for some reason the .uploaded file isn't create; to stop being asked to upload a crash report; you could always just rm the .crash file.

eg. a look in my directory on this system shows


guiverc@d7050-next:~$   ls -lah /var/crash
total 1.6M
drwxrwsrwt  2 root     whoopsie 4.0K Jan 30 15:02 .
drwxr-xr-x 16 root     root     4.0K Jul 11  2024 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root     whoopsie  279 Jan 30 14:02 kexec_cmd
-rw-r-----  1 guiverc  whoopsie  93K Jan 29 15:49 _usr_bin_blueman-applet.1000.crash
-rw-r--r--  1 guiverc  whoopsie    0 Jan 29 15:49 _usr_bin_blueman-applet.1000.upload
-rw-------  1 whoopsie whoopsie   37 Jan 29 15:49 _usr_bin_blueman-applet.1000.uploaded
-rw-r-----  1 guiverc  whoopsie 1.5M Jan 29 15:49 _usr_bin_lxqt-session.1000.crash
-rw-r--r--  1 guiverc  whoopsie    0 Jan 29 15:49 _usr_bin_lxqt-session.1000.upload
-rw-------  1 whoopsie whoopsie   37 Jan 29 15:49 _usr_bin_lxqt-session.1000.uploaded

Sorry I'm not using MATE today/yesterday, I thought of removing the crashes related to another flavor, but they're there, so left them. Either way the _usr_bin/... crashes were auto-reported as I don't recall being asked about it a day ago (29 Jan @ ~15:49)

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4

You probably don't need to re-install at all :slight_smile:

In most cases it is about something that went sideways after login, like a program somewhere in autostart that missed a file or some thing like that.

Anyway, after such an event this error window might pop up every time after login, even if the error itself is no longer valid.

To know about what caused the error you can examine the contents of the folder /var/crash

To keep the error window from popping up time and again, just empty the folder like this:

sudo rm /var/crash/*
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5

I had a similar experience with 24.04, fresh install.

Check the contents of the /var/crash folder; this will hint at what it causing the pop-up.

A few things consistently crashed for me, e.g.

  • blueman; Blueman devices panel error

  • I would get errors about fluidsynth;

    fluidsynth.service: ProtectHostname=yes is configured, but UTS namespace setup is prohibited (container manager?), ignoring namespace setup.
fluidsynth.service: Failed to drop capabilities: Operation not permitted
fluidsynth.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

    I fixed this following https://github.com/FluidSynth/fluidsynth/pull/1148/files

And others ... it'll all come down to what specifically is crashing out on your system.

I still get crashes; but you can disable the pop-up and crash reporting (look up 'disable apport').

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