Arch Linux

jernst

Member

From: Silicon Valley

Registered: 2014-03-04

Posts: 303

Website

[SOLVED] Gnome terminal and a handful of other apps are not starting

Brand-new installation of Arch with Gnome on VirtualBox on x86 Mac.

Everything is fine, except that some (not all) apps do not come up: a busy mouse pointer is on for a while, but then goes away without a trace of the app. This seems to affect Terminal, and Calendar, but not the web browser or the file manager.

Software current as of the time of this post.

Having some difficulties getting at the system journal given the inflexible VirtualBox console (is there a way to widen this?) but there are a bunch of messages like this, which I don't know are related or not:

dbus-daemon: Unknown username "polkitd" in message bus configuration...
dbus-daemon: Unknown username "colord" in message bus configuration...
dbus-daemon: Unknown username "avahi" in message bus configuration...
gsd-sharing: Failed to StopUnit service: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop....
org.gnome.Shell.desktop: glamor 'wl_drm' not supported
org.gnome.Shell.desktop: Missing Wayland requirements for glamor GBM...
gnome-session: gnome-session-binary: CRITICAL: Unable to create a DBus proxy for Gn...

(This is manually typed in, sorry for typos; can't easily at the text to the right).

Last edited by jernst (2021-04-24 21:19:07)

jernst

Member

From: Silicon Valley

Registered: 2014-03-04

Posts: 303

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Gnome terminal and a handful of other apps are not starting

So I installed KDE, where I can run konsole. From there, I invoked:

gnome-terminal

and after thinking for a while, it says:

# Error constructing proxy for org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.Terminal: Timeout was reached

So the error isn't a Gnome error per se, but one that relates to the gnome-terminal application. (P.S. I just realized I didn't need KDE for that, I can run konsole from Gnome)

I'm unclear what it is trying to do here to produce this error.

I came across some related posts like https://askubuntu.com/questions/1108808 … ut#1128108 but so far no luck.

Slithery

Administrator

From: Norfolk, UK

Registered: 2013-12-01

Posts: 5,776

Re: [SOLVED] Gnome terminal and a handful of other apps are not starting

How are you starting gnome?
If you use startx then please post your ~/.xinitrc
Also the output of hostnamectl

---

No, it didn't "fix" anything. It just shifted the brokeness one space to the right. - jasonwryan
Closing -- for deletion; Banning -- for muppetry. - jasonwryan

aur - dotfiles

jernst

Member

From: Silicon Valley

Registered: 2014-03-04

Posts: 303

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Gnome terminal and a handful of other apps are not starting

Found it!

There's an FAQ on related errors: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Terminal/FAQ

My exit code is 1, which isn't listed, but it's a direction. So I run /usr/lib/gnome-terminal-server and it says:

Non UTF-8 locale (ANSI_X3.4-1968) is not supported!

Which is a synonym for ASCII. In other words, gnome-terminal dies a silent death if your character set is ASCII. Not that I meant it to be, my fault forgetting to set it during installation, but some kind of error error reporting, now that would be a thing, wouldn't it.