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This happens to me sometimes, for the solution see at the end of this posting after the description of the error.
From GUI
I try to start an application (it might be that this only concerns gtk applications such as evince & gthumb but I don't know). The application does not start, instead I am told by my GUI (e17) 'XXXX (the application) stopped running unexpectedly. There was no error message. This error log will be saved as /home/...'. This error message matches the various joke error messages concocted by Microsoft in unhelpfulness. The log is not saved.
From Terminal
I try to start it from the terminal. The terminal tells me 'Bus error (core dumped)'. Nothing more. I could not find any coredump - though the journalctl log does at least know about this: "May 09 02:03:07 xxxxxx systemd-coredump[9439]: Process 9436 (XXXX) dumped core." Running the application with strace is also not very helpful, though it hints that it all has to do with dconf: "open("/etc/dconf/profile/user", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) (...) open("/home/xxxxx/.config/dconf/user", O_RDONLY) = 11"
Google searches etc.
Not helpful. But then again: who is going to talk about google any more in just a couple of years.
Solution
remove /home/<username>/.config/dconf/user
you might want to back it up somewhere; I have no idea what this file is and if you still might need it (guess not, but anyway).
It's not a regular file or directory, not a link and not a node. In the list command (ls) it appears like a regular file but you can't read from it (gives I/O error). Google: not helpful. Man page of dconf: self referential ('dconf - Simple tool for manipulating a dconf database') So my best guess is that dconf somehow is used to produce something that is involved in (hardware?) BUS handling which it chooses to store in ~/.config/dconf/ and which is not trivially understandable by simple minds like me.
We are exactly the people our parents always warned us about.
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It should be a regular (but binary) file; there is something wrong on your system (but I can't tell you what it is).
man page is not self-referential btw. You looked at the man page for the command-line tool dconf, which refers to the storage system dconf (see `man 7 dconf`).
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thanks, Raynman, for the reply.
you are right, dconf 7 is more enlightening.
and you were also right that there is something wrong with my fs. I don't know what but and I didn't yet have the time to try to find out what but since last weekend, I get ata0 (my harddisk, I guess) I/O errors thrown into the tty ... which is not very good.
the ~/.config/dconf/user is recreated after you delete it. now I have it as a normal file, partly binary, partly ascii, again.
We are exactly the people our parents always warned us about.
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