Mate-users-admin suddenly not working

Support & Help Requests
1

Running Ubuntu Mate 16.04.2 with Mate version 1.16.2
Nothing happens when starting from menu, starting from terminal gives this result:

Gtk-ERROR **: GTK+ 2.x symbols detected. Using GTK+ 2.x and GTK+ 3 in the same process is not supported

i did not find mate-users-admin in synaptic there was something called mate-accountsdialog which I installed and which issued the same error.

I did install libgtk2.0.0 and libgtk2.0-dev earlier as I was compiling software that needed it. Could that have caused this? Why would mate-users-admin no longer show up in the repo?

2

I'm not sure there ever was a "mate-users-admin". There is a "users-admin" A.K.A. menu item "Users and Groups" which is part of the package gnome-system-tools.

~$ which users-admin 
/usr/bin/users-admin
~$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/users-admin
gnome-system-tools: /usr/bin/users-admin
~$

I have a VM of 16.04.1 / MATE 1.16.2 which is close so I installed libgtk2.0-dev and the 65 dependents it brings and have no problem running users-admin. I found libgtk2.0-0 already installed.

It sure looks like a library may have changed - but how to find it I'm not sure. Here's dependents of gnome-system-tools:

image.png367×570 28.1 KB

Anything look familiar?

1 Like
3

I did figure out that users-admin was the correct command. I can’t for the life of me figure out how the mate-users-admin got into my menu entry. Or why it issued an error from the terminal when now it simply says ‘not found’. I guess I’m getting old.

Thanks Bill!

4

Hi @quonsar. No problem, I know how it is. And I couldn’t for the life of me remember dpkg -S. We don’t get old, just have to google more. :slight_smile:

5

This sounds like a system upgrade from some pre-16.04 release, because mate-system-tools (which contains mate-users-admin tool) had been discontinued upstream after MATE 1.8, and wasn’t packaged in Ubuntu since then. Therefore you won’t get it with the clean 16.04 install, and it’s not in 16.04 repos as well, because 16.04 has MATE 1.12.
It was a fork of gnome-system-tools, and all the tools were pretty much the same, just with “mate-” prefix added to avoid package conflicts.

Now about the problem. In MATE 1.16 some MATE packages were migrated to GTK+3. Among them there’s libpolkit-gtk-mate-1-0, which isn’t really used by any other package now, but on your system it’s still used by the good old mate-system-tools. After the upgrade to 1.16 (I presume you’ve used the official PPA for that) you’ve got a mix of a GTK+2 app and a GTK+3 library which is used by that app. That’s forbidden in GTK+ and leads to immediate abort of the app.
It’s best to remove mate-system-tools and continue using gnome-system-tools, which doesn’t have the issue.