Starting File Manager in loop

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radleysmall

Starting File Manager in loop

Post by radleysmall »

Hi, I'm running LM 10 on an EeePC and it's run perfectly for months up until this morning when I turned on the computer and realized it booted up incredibly slow. I can get to the desktop but there's a window that says "Starting File Manager" that lasts about 10 seconds then goes away, only to come back again a few seconds later. It loops like this infinitely.

I can't access the Home folder, I assume because of the file manager thing. Luckily about 95% of my files are backed up so no catastrophes here, but I would like that 5% I've changed in the last couple days. I've resorted to opening LibreOffice and opening each file I want manually, then hitting Save As... and saving them to my thumb drive. It's working...very...slowly.

I didn't install anything yesterday. All I did was work on text documents all day. I also did internet searches and found people with the looping File Manager thing...but they were bugs in RCs or Beta versions and none of the solutions seemed appropriate.

I should also add that the desktop is essentially frozen. The panel works, but wifi does not (it did before...like yesterday/last night). But files on the desktop are not showing up.

Any ideas as to what's going on here?
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
radleysmall

Re: Starting File Manager in loop

Post by radleysmall »

Upon further research it seems that reinstalling Nautilus will perhaps fix this...but as I'm a relative noob, I'm not sure what is the best way to go about this. Can someone fill me in? Thanks a ton.
AlbertP
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Re: Starting File Manager in loop

Post by AlbertP »

Open Software Manager, look for 'nautilus', then click uninstall. When it's ready, restart Software Manager, again look for 'nautilus' and now an 'install' button has appeared.

You can also enter this command in the 'terminal' and press Enter to do the same:

Code: Select all

apt reinstall nautilus
Note that, when you enter a password in terminal, nothing appears to happen. But in fact the password is made invisible while typing.
Registered Linux User #528502
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Feel free to correct me if I'm trying to write in Spanish, French or German.
radleysmall

Re: Starting File Manager in loop

Post by radleysmall »

Thanks AlbertP.

I reinstalled Nautilus with no seeming difficulty but the system took an unfortunate step backwards when I rebooted. LM seemed borked. It would just hang at the loading splash screen. Not sure what the deal is. I have another partition that seemed to load fine. Think I might just reinstall LM and see what happens.

Thanks again.
n4mwd

Re: Starting File Manager in loop

Post by n4mwd »

Sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but did you ever find a solution to the problem? Mine is now doing the same thing.

I consider myself a newbie and this kind of thing is strange to me. When I telnet in (for the moment it still lets me do that) it says "Linux Mint 14 Nadia (GNU/Linux 3.5.0-17-generic i686)". According to TOP, the most CPU hungry apps are wnck-applet, caja and gvfsd-trash. I've seen the trash one go to 95% and stay there. I killed wnck-applet and that stopped the continuous flow of "Starting File Managers", but now the desktop doesn't work right.

So did you ever figure anything out that doesn't break something else? I don't want to go the reformat and reinstall route because I have stuff on there I want to keep.
n4mwd

Re: Starting File Manager in loop

Post by n4mwd »

OK, a little research and I found a few other things. The program "caja" is defined at http://community.linuxmint.com/software/view/caja . There is says:
Caja is the official file manager for the mate desktop. it allows to browse directories, preview files and launch applications associated with them. it is also responsible for handling the icons on the mate desktop. it works on local and remote filesystems.
So I think I found the bad guy. Also, when I type dmesg at the prompt, I get an endless supply of these lines:

Code: Select all

[ 2012.295793] caja[16361]: segfault at 0 ip b6c8b7da sp bfedef28 error 4 in libglib-2.0.so.0.3400.1[b6c55000+fa000]
[ 2013.035828] caja[16366]: segfault at 0 ip b6bee7da sp bfa4b3e8 error 4 in libglib-2.0.so.0.3400.1[b6bb8000+fa000]
[ 2013.758046] caja[16371]: segfault at 0 ip b6c557da sp bfaf8898 error 4 in libglib-2.0.so.0.3400.1[b6c1f000+fa000]
Every line has "caja" and "libglib-2.0.so.0.3400.1" in common so the bug is in there somewhere.

My only problem is that I don't know how to replicate this bug (not that anybody would want to). I only know that it went bad after I installed samba4 with apt-get.
pcardout

Re: Starting File Manager in loop -- FIX FOUND

Post by pcardout »

Greetings Minties! This is my first post. I am fairly new to this distro, but I have Unix chops
dating from the 80's and have been a full-time Linux user since 2002.

This File manager in loop problem happened to me
a couple days after I installed Linux Mint 17 (possibly because I installed gtk2-engines-oxygen)

This problem is a bug, and it is described here: https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/pull/101

As was properly stated above, caja, the Linux Mint Mate file manager, is to blame, or rather, this is what
happens when the script /usr/bin/startcaja repeatedly fails.

The fix is described in the link above, but I will summarize it here.

Edit the file

Code: Select all

sudo vim  /usr/share/applications/caja.desktop
Change this line
Exec=/usr/bin/startcaja
To this:

Code: Select all

Exec=/usr/bin/startcaja --sync
You are done!

More background for people who want to dig deeper (or fix it correctly...)
caja is the file-manager formerly known as nautilus[\b].

If you have this problem yourself, then you probably have lots of errors in your syslog. Try the
following:

Code: Select all

 grep /var/log/syslog caja 
And see if you don't get lots of instances something like:
Nov 17 14:04:14 (hostname) kernel: [ 1069.712673] caja[7845]: segfault at 4 ip 00007ff0fea13011 sp 00007fff2a5e6c00 error 4 in libcairo.so.2.11301.0[7ff0fe9f2000+106000]
A very similar bug (or the same?) was documented in nautilus back in 2009.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/325973
n4mwd

Re: Starting File Manager in loop

Post by n4mwd »

Thanks. Hopefully this will help other people that get this bug. I had this a while back and the only solution was to reformat and reinstall. If it ever does that again, I will try your fix for sure.
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