Arch Linux

enyaw_ecurb

Member

Registered: 2010-02-12

Posts: 28

[Solved] Alacarte causes segfault in xfce4-panel/xfdesktop

Hello there,

after I spent the last 6 hours fixing a system running Xfce and not finding anything related to my issue on googe, I decided to share my findings to spare others the trouble.

Alacarte (the menu editor) does not work with Xfce4. It produces menu-files which cause Xfce to crash. You will find segfaults (and associated coredumps) of xfce4-panel and xfdesktop depending on your panel configuration in your logs. The system can become unusable (for the not so tech-savy user) after a reboot, cause you are left with a blank desktop.
One method to fix this is to delete the content of .local/share/desktop-directories/ and .local/share/applications e.g.

# mv .local/share/desktop-directories/ .local/share/desktop-directories_old
# mv .local/share/applications .local/share/applications_old

Some trivia: The bug was provoked due to the user of the pc clicking around with the software on the pc. I accidentally left Alacarte which was a fine menu editor for earlier versions of Xfce on the pc. As far as I can reconstruct the situation the user removed (or added) menu entries in Alacarte and saved the menu. As the menu button did not work the user rebooted the pc and was left with a blank (non starting) desktop.
When I took a look at the pc I was startled by the segfaults of core components of xfce which traced back to libglib2. As there were other bugs that showed the same behaviour I was sidetracked and it took a while to figure out the true cause of the problems.

Cheers and good night...