Linux Mint Forums

Posted: **Sun Nov 03, 2013 9:40 am**

So I haven't changed anything significant in my system lately (Mint 15, 64-bit, Cinnamon), but I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of my hard drive thrashing. There were a ton of error messages, most of which I was too tired to read, and my system was pretty unresponsive, so I powered off.

Now, today, when I boot, I see the GUI login screen as usual, but then nothing works right. I get popups saying that Cinnamon has crashed and is running in fallback mode; indicating that I wish to restart cinnamon does nothing but bring back that prompt. I make it in anyway (to a system that looks nothing like cinnamon, with a menu bar at both the top and bottom of my screen), and my system is still relatively unresponsive. I notice that 2 processes, indicator-datetime-settings and gnome-settings-daemon, are both taking up most of my CPU, and are both using up increasing amounts of memory. Killing the processes just causes them to respawn. (Currently they're together taking up 4 GB of memory, having last been killed 6 minutes ago.) This problem has survived across multiple reboots.

The only thing that changed recently that I can think of is that Daylight Saving Time just ended in the US overnight last night; is there a chance that's related? I also installed stunnel and pan yesterday, but everything worked fine for hours after that.

I'm happy to look at logs or anything to help troubleshoot this, but really I don't even know where to start. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Posted: **Sun Nov 03, 2013 9:53 am**

Here's syslog from overnight when the problem presumably started:

Code: Select all

Nov  3 04:05:06 chesed CRON[30934]: (root) CMD (command -v debian-sa1 > /dev/null && debian-sa1 1 1)
Nov  3 04:15:07 chesed CRON[30945]: (root) CMD (command -v debian-sa1 > /dev/null && debian-sa1 1 1)
Nov  3 04:17:05 chesed CRON[31019]: (root) CMD (   cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly)
Nov  3 04:18:26 chesed kernel: [2708352.517231] gnome-panel[30583]: segfault at 7ff02c048a00 ip 00007ff02c048a00 sp 00007ffff72adf48 err
or 15
Nov  3 04:19:01 chesed gnome-session[2580]: WARNING: Application 'cinnamon.desktop' killed by signal 15
Nov  3 04:19:01 chesed gnome-session[2580]: WARNING: App 'cinnamon.desktop' respawning too quickly
Nov  3 04:19:02 chesed gnome-session[2580]: dconf-CRITICAL: unable to create file '/home/josh/.cache/dconf/user': Permission denied.  dc
onf will not work properly.
Nov  3 04:19:07 chesed gnome-session[2580]: WARNING: App 'cinnamon.desktop' respawning too quickly
Nov  3 04:19:07 chesed gnome-session[2580]: dconf-CRITICAL: unable to create file '/home/josh/.cache/dconf/user': Permission denied.  dc
onf will not work properly.
Nov  3 04:19:08 chesed gnome-session[2580]: WARNING: App 'cinnamon.desktop' respawning too quickly
Nov  3 04:19:08 chesed gnome-session[2580]: dconf-CRITICAL: unable to create file '/home/josh/.cache/dconf/user': Permission denied.  dconf will not work properly.
Nov  3 04:19:30 chesed dbus[1218]: [system] Activating service name='org.freedesktop.hostname1' (using servicehelper)
Nov  3 04:19:33 chesed dbus[1218]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.hostname1'

Now there's a LOT of this in syslog:

Code: Select all

Nov  3 08:26:35 chesed gnome-session[2581]: dconf-CRITICAL: unable to create file '/home/josh/.cache/dconf/user': Permission denied.  dconf will not work properly.
Nov  3 08:27:06  gnome-session[2581]: last message repeated 109 times
Nov  3 08:28:07  gnome-session[2581]: last message repeated 224 times
Nov  3 08:29:08  gnome-session[2581]: last message repeated 128 times
Nov  3 08:30:10  gnome-session[2581]: last message repeated 142 times
Nov  3 08:30:44  gnome-session[2581]: last message repeated 73 times

Posted: **Sun Nov 03, 2013 9:59 pm**

My system is all better now. The solution seems to be to remove the offending file (i.e. ~/.cache/dconf/user), and allow it to be re-created by the correct user/group. If the problem persisted, the next thing I would've tried is the solution at http://gawainlynch.com/gnome-shell-crashes-after-su/ . I don't remember explicitly calling su, but this nonetheless seems to be a very similar problem.

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