October 10, 2010 by

GNOME Do Ubuntu 10.04 crashes on login

If you’re like me and use GNOME Do in dock mode and have it start on login in Ubuntu 10.04 you’ve probably noticed that it seems to crash when you login. After a long while putting it off I eventually went in search of a solution. It seems that Compiz and GNOME Do don’t like loading at the same time. So the solution is to delay GNOME Do from loading until Compiz is loaded, which seems to stop GNOME Do from crashing on Ubuntu. I found the solution on the Ubuntu forums, posted by stinkeye. Below I have copied stinkeye’s instructions so they are not lost in the Ubuntu forums.

How-To

Firstly I would make sure you are running Compiz at startup by installing wmctrl.

sudo apt-get install wmctrl

Once installed, type in the below command and you should get terminal output like the one below

wmctrl -m

and it should tell you what window manager is running.
For example, I get

Name: compiz
Class: N/A
PID: N/A
Window manager's "showing the desktop" mode: OFF

This is a script used to delay gnome-do from starting till compiz is loaded.

#! /bin/bash
until [ "$done" = "true" ]
do
	if [ $(dbus-send --print-reply --type=method_call --dest=org.freedesktop.compiz /org/freedesktop/compiz/dbus/screen0 org.freedesktop.compiz.list | wc -l) != 0 ]
	then
		DISPLAY=:0.0 gnome-do >/dev/null 2>&1 &

		done="true";
	else
		echo "GNOME-DO IS WAITING"
		done="false"
		sleep 5;
	fi
done
exit 0

Save this in your home folder as start_do. Right click on start_do, go to Properties -> Permissions and tick the “execute” box. Go to your gnome do preferences and untick start gnome-do at login. Open startup applications and add start_do to the startup programs by adding

/home/your-username/start_do

Now when you boot that script will be run and only start GNOME Do once Compiz has been completely loaded. Again a big thanks to the original poster of the instructions, stinkeye on the Ubuntu forums

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About the Author

Ciarán McCann

Flax Project Founder - Ciarán McCann is an extremely passionate and motivated programmer who has been programming for about 4 years now. Currently attending Carlow I.T studying computer games development. He has experience in many different programming languages, markup languages and general technologies. His role in the Flax Project is as a blogger/Web Designer and Flax Engine programmer. Please excuse any bad grammar/spelling, I am a bit on the Dyslexic side. Follow me on Twitter for info on what I am working on.

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3 Comments

  1. Ben October 10, 2010

    Seriously.. Do you think this hack/workaround is a good idea? Can you provide links to the bug reports you (or stinkeye, or anyone else that has a similar problem) created?

    Seems really weird to me to meddle with ugly things like these instead of fixing the root cause (or helping the devs to do just that)..

    • Ciáran McCann October 10, 2010

      This problem has been widely reported. Just Google it.. This solution worked perfectly for me. It was simple and its an option, not saying its the best but it works. Thanks for the comment.

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