clock-applet freezes when clicking on time

Thanks for the report, please try to obtain a backtrace of the hang following the instructions at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash and upload the backtrace (as an attachment) to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

Ubuntu 10.04:
clock-applet freezes when clicking to open, click to close and then click to open again.

Disabling exchange email account in Evolution 2.28.3 fixes this. Other similar bugs seem to have a problem with Google Calendar.

Starting clock-applet manually shows:

$ /usr/lib/gnome-panel/clock-applet

(clock-applet:5869): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/buildd/gtk+2.0-2.20.0/gdk/x11/gdkdrawable-x11.c:952 drawable is not a pixmap or window

** (clock-applet:5869): WARNING **: The calendar backend for exchange://user;<email address hidden>/;personal/Tasks has crashed.

** (clock-applet:5869): WARNING **: The calendar backend for exchange://user;<email address hidden>/;personal/Calendar/Outlook%20Calendar has crashed.

** (clock-applet:5869): WARNING **: The calendar backend for exchange://user;<email address hidden>/;personal/Calendar/MeetingRequest%5b1%5d%2eics has crashed.

** (clock-applet:5869): WARNING **: The calendar backend for exchange://user;<email address hidden>/;personal/Calendar/MeetingRequest%2evcs%2eics has crashed.

** (clock-applet:5869): WARNING **: The calendar backend for exchange://user;<email address hidden>/;personal/Calendar/Home has crashed.

** (clock-applet:5869): WARNING **: The calendar backend for exchange://user;<email address hidden>/;personal/Calendar has crashed.

** (clock-applet:5869): WARNING **: Error preparing the query: '#t': Backend is busy

@Pedro: I've updated the backtrace as you requested. Thanks for investigating.

@Malp: I do not use Evolution or have an exchange email account and I still have the issue. The clock applet works fine for the most part; It displays the time and I can right click and use the various items that appear in the contextual menu. The applet hangs when I left click to display the calender. Incidentally, I am also running Ubuntu 10.4 on my Netbook, and don't experience the issue there at all. It's quite strange.

Hi,

I'm also facing a similar problem.

I am also having the same problem.

I am also having a similar problem.
If I enter the clock preferences dialog and swich between 12h and 24h format back and forth, the clock unfreezes.

Marc, may you please try again? the backtrace doesn't show much, sorry for the late reply. Reporters, if you think you have the same issue please attach a backtrace to the report, follow the instructions i've posted previously. Thanks.

Strangely enough, it's just started working for me this week. (ie. not crashing on click). I had assumed that whatever was causing this was fixed during one of the Update Manager's routine updates.

Regards,

--
Marc

In my case, evolution stopped to work. I will check why its happen.

I found this bug issue searching the web. I notified a similar bug (#578701) on May 11th 2010: my the bug vanished on June 1st, and it reappeared again just yesterday.

The symptom: clock applet freezes at bootstrap and it stays frozen forever. If I run "sudo kill -HUP `pidof gnome-panel`" the whole gnome-panel starts up again, and the clock applet starts working fine.

I can't provide You crash informations, because I have no crash here. So I don't know what to attach here. Please, any hint?

[I marked bug #578701) as duplicate of this one today.]

Ciao
CM

As said in my previous comment : please provide a backtrace of the issue, otherwise don't set it to new, thanks.

Many thanks for Your help.

Please, specify what do You mean with "backtrace" in my case. See comment #12 ... I have no crash on my computer. The clock just freeze at boot even if the process is running. With "freeze" I mean that the displayed figures don't change in time, and don't change if I modify the set up (show seconds on-off, show date on-off, show temperature on-off). I can access all the menus and sub-menus of clock-applet without experiencing faults or crashes. The only symptom is that the displayed figures are frozen.

When I kill the gnome-panel process, clock-applet restart in a correct status, and everything then works well.

I would like to collect a "backtrace" of this strange behaviour ... please, tell me how ...

Thanks again.

Ciao
CM

Many thanks for Your help, so far. I'm sorry to bother You again. After my comment (see #14) on June 30th, I tried to make clock-applet crashing, but I can't: it stands still, freezed but not crashing. Therefore I'm not able to collect "backtracking" info for You.

However, the bug is here, it is a real bug, not just a "ghost".

Is there any other way to collect info about this problem? Any log file? As You can see, I spend daily some time focusing onto this problem, therefore it could be worth considering to spend this time in some effective way. Any hint? I would like to help debugging this problem ...

Ciao
CM

Today the clock applet works normally. No need to kill and restart it. I have no new package installed (no upgrade was made since 2 days). Therefore it seems that today the bug is not here for some "local" reason. However, this is the first time the clock applet works normally since May 11th (2 months!!!).

I browsed the menu "preferences" menu entry (right-click), and normal left-click popup. Everything is ok: no crash, no bug here today.

Ciao
CM

Hi there. I prevented You to receive some other messages from me: from July 13 till now I experienced days when the but appeared and days when the bug vanished.

Today I tried a workaround read from bug #439448 - comment #205 - I added a 3 seconds delay at gnome-panel startup. Then I tried to reboot my sytem MANY TIMES and now I can say that the clock applet works correctly at startup.

This is not a "bug fix" but a simply workaround. I cannot argue why the 3 seconds delay at gnome panel startup let it works.

Ciao
CM

Hello. I've run into the same problem as the original bug submitter.

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS
Release: 10.04
--
$ apt-cache policy packagename gnome-panel
gnome-panel:
  Installed: 1:2.30.2-0ubuntu0.2
  Candidate: 1:2.30.2-0ubuntu0.2
--
$ uname -a
Linux kungfubuntu 2.6.32-25-generic #44-Ubuntu SMP Fri Sep 17 20:05:27 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux
--

I've never seen this issue till this afternoon. When I kill and reload the applet, I can right click the clock applet
and perform a variety of operations and the applet doesn't crash (or middle click and move the applet). However a
left-click results in a crash.

I tried: strace -o clockTrace -Ff -tt -p <PIDofapplet> after a reload and please find the strace attached. I do not use
Evolution, I do have the Compiz eye-candy installed but using metacity at the moment. I also have VMware running
on the Ubuntu host. When I left-click on the applet and the applet crashes, ps shows me the following process:

" 6232 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/gnome-panel/gnome-clock-applet-mechanism"

When I connect to that pid via strace, I see the following output before strace returns in about 30 seconds:
---
restart_syscall(<... resuming interrupted call ...>

) = 0
poll([{fd=5, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=7, events=POLLIN}], 3, 628) = 0 (Timeout)
write(1, "** (process:6232): DEBUG: Exitin"..., 52) = 52
exit_group(1) = ?
---

The strace attached is for the clock-applet process.

For what it's worth, restarting gdm resulted in a lost repro.

Same issue as above - on going for months now!

I had the same problem (Ubuntu 10.10). The following solved it for me:

- remove evolution packages (evolution, evolution-exchange, evolution-data-server, libevolution, openoffice.org-evolution, evolution-common)
- kill /usr/lib/evolution/e-calendar-factory

Sigh. I've got a frozen panel clock. Removing evolution hardly seems like an attractive solution.

This seems to be a problem in e-calendar-factory. You can kill `pidof e-calendar-factory`, without uninstalling evolution, and the freeze goes away(evolution will start a new e-calendar-factory process, which seems to resolve the issue). Unfortunately, I couldn't provide an strace, since the problem has not yet recurred.

Let me say that the problem vanished after my upgrade to Maverick. My computer is no more affected by this bug.

Thanks so far.

Ciao
CM

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Oneiric Ocelot. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Expired for gnome-panel (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]