Update kills XFCE

[pjwagner]

tl;dr
Upgrading Salix 15 or installing Audacity renders XFCE disfunctional, while a few months ago installing Audacity (and VLC) worked.

(sorry for the rather long history I am giving in the following, but since I have no clue *what* went wrong *when*, I thought it might help to pin down any nasty things that have happened)

I first installed Salix (coming from Slackware, albeit being a *very* lazy Slacker) a few months ago -- the oldest file from 2024 in my $HOME is from Jun 11, 2024, so I guess it was that day. I assume I installed Salix 15, but I am not 100% sure since my installation USB was destroyed in the meantime. Everything worked really nicely almost out of the box. I use VLC and Audacity quite a lot, which I assume i installed via gslapt immediately after setting up Salix (but I don't have any recollection of doing so). Yesterday I fired up gslapt again, because I felt it was time to do some updates. Since I choose my root partition a bit too small, I needed to make space for the updates, so I tried to delete packages which I thought were not needed (LLVM, mariadb, sane). Bad idea, as Audacity depends on them. So I immediately re-installed Audacity. But already during the re-install process the XFCE Taskbar disappeared. When i rebooted the machine, it could not launch the Lightdm greeter. Instead, init looped for a few times, announcing 'Starting up X11 session manager', and then paused for 5 minutes. I went to another console, checked .xsession-errors, the Lightdm-logs, manualle re-installed some of the removed packages, also re-installed some packages that were actually already present, but to no avail. When I switched to runlevel 3 and issued startx, I got an X-Server with mouse, but no XFCE elements (Desktop, Icons, Taskbar, ...). When I sudoed a bash and issued startx, I got an XFCE desktop, but that apparently is of no use. (I did not compare the logfiles from a regular user's startx and root's startx, should have done that, but at midnight ...)

Today, I downloaded Salix 15 again, and installed a brand new Linux, only keeping my home partition. Again, everything worked nicely, I could boot, Lightdm greeter came up, and XFCE was up and running. Then I fired up gslapt, did an update, and upgraded all packages available. During that, again the XFCE Taskbar vanished, and rebooting gave the same problem with Lightdm again.

So I did another new install (again leaving home untouched), again XFCE worked after that. This time, I thought better be smart and don't upgrade, so I just updated in gslapt and installed Audacity. And to my surprise, XFCE was rendered disfunctional again. This time, I saved .xsession-erros and the output of startx when run from a virtual console in runlevel 3. I noticed, as in all other occasions, that there seems to be something wrong with pixbuf and some icons:

Code: Select all

(wrapper-2.0:1348): Gtk-WARNING **: 17:14:52.363: Could not load a pixbuf from icon theme.
This may indicate that pixbuf loaders or the mime database could not be found.
**
Gtk:ERROR:../gtk/gtkiconhelper.c:494:ensure_surface_for_gicon: assertion failed (error == NULL): Failed to load /usr/share/icons/Qogir/scalable/status/image-missing.svg: Unrecognised image file format (gdk-pixbuf-error-quark, 3)
xfce4-panel-Message: 17:14:52.369: Plugin power-manager-plugin-20 has been automatically restarted after crash.

and later (empty lines removed)

Code: Select all

(xfdesktop:4927): GdkPixbuf-CRITICAL **: 17:14:53.330: gdk_pixbuf_get_width: assertion 'GDK_IS_PIXBUF (pixbuf)' failed
(xfdesktop:4927): GdkPixbuf-CRITICAL **: 17:14:53.330: gdk_pixbuf_scale_simple: assertion 'GDK_IS_PIXBUF (src)' failed
(xfdesktop:4927): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 17:14:53.330: g_object_unref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
(xfdesktop:4927): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 17:14:53.330: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

It all ends with

Code: Select all

(xfdesktop:4974): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 17:14:54.944: _gtk_cairo_blur_surface: assertion 'cairo_image_surface_get_format (surface) == CAIRO_FORMAT_A8' failed
(xfdesktop:4974): Gtk-WARNING **: 17:14:54.944: drawing failure for widget 'XfdesktopIconView': invalid value (typically too big) for the size of the input (surface, pattern, etc.)
(xfdesktop:4974): Gtk-WARNING **: 17:14:54.944: drawing failure for widget 'XfceDesktop': invalid value (typically too big) for the size of the input (surface, pattern, etc.)
**
Wnck:ERROR:../libwnck/xutils.c:2348:default_icon_at_size: assertion failed: (base)
(xfce4-terminal:2187): Gtk-WARNING **: 17:15:57.158: Could not load a pixbuf from icon theme.
This may indicate that pixbuf loaders or the mime database could not be found.
**
Gtk:ERROR:../gtk/gtkiconhelper.c:494:ensure_surface_for_gicon: assertion failed (error == NULL): Failed to load /usr/share/icons/Qogir/16/actions/image-missing.svg: Unrecognised image file format (gdk-pixbuf-error-quark, 3)

Also the startx output has those gdk_pixbuf_* and g_object_* assertion messages. In some kind of despair I ran the setup.07.update-desktop-database, setup.07.update-mime-database, and setup.08.gtk-update-icon-cache scripts in /var/lib/pkgtools/setup after crashing, but that did not help.

My question now is if anybody has a clue what is going on here? I have a freshly installed and running system now, but it lacks Audacity and VLC, which I need. Why did the install of those two work in June? Were other versions current at that time? I am also a bit timid to install or update anything as long as I don't have any other means of getting a running Linux apart from a total re-install.

Thanks for your patience,

Paul

[djemos]

I did an installation from salix-live xfce 15.0 to vmware.
I upgraded the system including kernel, glibc, etc.
I did a reboot.
Then i installed the audacity (25 dependencies packages downloaded) and the vlc (35 dependencies packages downloaded). I installed multimedia codecs.
Everything is working fine. No problem at all.

[pjwagner]

I installed from the install ISO, not from the live ISO, could there be any difference?

I also did not change the default exclusions (kernel, glibc) of gslapt, could that make a difference (given that they contain only lower level infrastructure, and XFCE worked as root)?

[djemos]

You cannot upgrade glibc, kernel-firmware, kernel packages from gslapt.
use slapt-get in a terminal
sudo slapt-get -i glibc

It is not glibc. Something else went wrong.

[gapan]

How much disk space do you have? Could it be that you just ran out?

[pjwagner]

@gapan After a fresh install I have 2.6G left in / (and /usr, same fs). So with the first time, disk space could have been an issue, but not with the second and the third re-install.

[gapan]

2.6GB left is too little. Upgrades are possibly more than that.

[pjwagner]

@gapan So the additional space required that gslapt reports before doing the updates is meaningless? Becaus in my case with the previous update that was around 700MB.

[pjwagner]

Gave the upgrade another try, this time unchecked all big packages (llvm, libreoffice, ...). gslapt reported around 80MB will be downloaded, and some 180MB additional space will be required. Had a console open to df periodically, went from 2.5GB free space on / to 2.4GB, but never lower. Right in the middle of the update the XFCE taskbar disappeared again, and .xsession-errors shows those pixbuf criticals again. So I guess I have to re-install once again ...

[pjwagner]

I kind of found my way around it, but I am not really satisfied because I don't understand what is going, and I fear all that might happen again.

So what I did with today's re-install was not to reuse my old home partition, but let the installer create a new /home in my root partition and populate it. And with this setup (lacking all my previous customisations, and data files), I could do all upgrades and install audacity and vlc. And now the funny part: After all was set up, I edited fstab to mount my old home partition on /home, and the machine booted without a problem, and the X session came up.

What I don't understand: Before I even create a session, any possibly faulty configuration file in my home should be of no concern to the greeter, right? I'd like to know what is going on here, because if I don't, I have to assume any future upgrade could break my system again. (And unmounting my home partition every time before doing an upgrade to hava a pristine home feels ... weird?)