Update kills XFCE
Posted: 30. Oct 2024, 19:41
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:
and later (empty lines removed)
It all ends with
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
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.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)' failedCode: 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)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