Tails

#3 Updated by intrigeri 2015-11-18 02:51:35

To clarify, there are at least two different bugs that we should not mix up:

1. the one I’ve reported here, where widgets in the tray are somewhat narrowed (to their arrow, with a dot instead of the expected text);
2. one I see on a ThinkPad X61, where (as soon as the “Synchronizing the system’s clock” notification appears) some widgets in the tray (main top right menu, accessibility, arrow icon of the keyboard layout switcher) become invisible unless clicked, but retain their original full width. Let’s please not discuss this one here, and instead file a dedicated ticket if, and only if, we can reproduce it on hardware that satisfies our documented requirements.

#5 Updated by intrigeri 2016-01-08 12:36:28

I’ve received some logs about it.

#6 Updated by intrigeri 2016-01-09 21:50:34

OK, so I can reproduce it (“I don’t see the date/time nor the ibus menu icon”) in a VM on my system if I run stress --cpu 3 --io 4 --vm 2 --vm-bytes 128M at the same time; not 100% of the time, but I can make it happen. I have found one error in the logs that I only see when the bug happens: gnome-session[2343]: (gnome-shell:2871): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: /build/glib2.0-EvFudu/glib2.0-2.42.1/./gobject/gsignal.c:2579: instance '0x94b20f0' has no handler with id '32170'. It refers to https://sources.debian.net/src/glib2.0/2.42.1-1/gobject/gsignal.c/?hl=2501#L2579.

In the last set of logs + screenshot sajolida sent me, I see exactly the same symptom, and this line is in his logs too. It’s also in his logs from another session that exposed a similar bug.

I’m not sure where this leads me, but at least I feel I can now possibly work on it. Maybe.

#8 Updated by intrigeri 2016-01-09 22:15:42

In the first set of logs sajolida sent me, I see topIcons -related error that are similar to those on Bug #10807#note-3, but not exactly the same:

Jan 06 11:08:33 amnesia gnome-session[30034]: (gnome-shell:30263): Gjs-WARNING **: JS ERROR: TypeError: parent is null
Jan 06 11:08:33 amnesia gnome-session[30034]: moveToTop@/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/topIcons@adel.gadllah@gmail.com/extension.js:135

#9 Updated by intrigeri 2016-01-09 23:47:31

I don’t seem to be able to reproduce this bug with an ISO that has the topIcons extension disabled:

--- a/config/chroot_local-includes/etc/dconf/db/local.d/00_Tails_defaults
+++ b/config/chroot_local-includes/etc/dconf/db/local.d/00_Tails_defaults
@@ -85,5 +85,5 @@ antialiasing = 'rgba'
 hinting = 'slight'

 [org/gnome/shell]
-enabled-extensions = ['apps-menu@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com', 'window-list@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com', 'topIcons@adel.gadllah@gmail.com', 'shutdown-helper@tails.boum.org']
+enabled-extensions = ['apps-menu@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com', 'window-list@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com', 'shutdown-helper@tails.boum.org']
 favorite-apps=['tor-browser.desktop', 'icedove.desktop', 'pidgin.desktop', 'keepassx.desktop', 'gnome-terminal.desktop']

I don’t know if the topIcons extension is buggy, or merely triggering a bug in GNOME Shell. In the source code of topIcons, in function onTrayIconAdded, I see something that looks like a crude hack, that waits 500ms twice and then gives up. I would not be surprised if this was not very reliable under heavy load. Perhaps Bug #8309 is more urgent that we thought?

#12 Updated by intrigeri 2016-01-10 22:16:33

Called for help, and summed up the three options I see: https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2016-January/010060.html

#16 Updated by intrigeri 2016-01-19 15:24:56

sajolida wrote:
> Another quite annoying symptom of this issue (still present in rc1) is that clickable areas of widgets and their icons are not at the same place. For example, nothing happens when I click on the Florence icon but Florence appears when I click elsewhere (on the left of the OpenPGP Applet). See screenshot.

I see that there’s a hack in the code to handle clickProxy.set_position. I suspect it’s not done at the right time, or should be done once more, or something.

#17 Updated by intrigeri 2016-01-19 19:00:28

Similar issues reported elsewhere:

• on https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/495/topicons/ quite a few similar problems are described
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/2g06t7/icons_disappearing_from_notification_tray_using/
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1269181

Potential alternative to topIcons:

• the https://github.com/wincinderith/topicons fork has changes in areas that might be relevant to the problems we see
• https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/192/status-icon-fixer/

#19 Updated by intrigeri 2016-01-19 19:53:31

Reported upstream via https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/495/topicons/ and over direct email (topIcons@adel.gadllah@gmail.com). Asked for help to a few GNOME people (tails-dev@ Cc’ed).

#20 Updated by intrigeri 2016-01-19 20:00:18

Tweeted the call for help (this is what I’m doing in 2016, really? :) https://twitter.com/Tails_live/status/689537619928178690

#23 Updated by intrigeri 2016-02-10 12:07:23

I got some more info, screenshots and logs. Perhaps we could document “disable topIcons, restart GNOME Shell, enable topIcons” as a workaround.

#24 Updated by intrigeri 2016-02-13 04:19:49

Just seen it in the automated test suite! FWIW, everything looks fine until the Vidalia icon appears.

#26 Updated by intrigeri 2016-02-29 12:40:06

Note to myself: removing Vidalia did not fully fix this: https://jenkins.tails.boum.org/job/manual_test_Tails_ISO_experimental/50/

#28 Updated by sajolida 2016-03-07 11:36:50

In the coming days I’ll try to experiment with removing one by one the widgets we have in TopIcons. Maybe it was not Vidalia but another one that was generating the bug.

#29 Updated by emmapeel 2016-03-07 17:53:15

After many days of not opening it, and not seeing the bug, today I had this problem again after opening KeepassX (Qt based like Vidalia)

#32 Updated by sajolida 2016-03-15 17:14:40

I reproduced this today with Florence disabled and KeePassX not in the tray icons either. I had OpenPGP Applet, Pidgin, and Clementine (custom).

#33 Updated by sajolida 2016-03-16 11:37:11

I reproduced this again today with only Florence and Clementine (no Pidgin, no KeePassX, no OpenPGP Applet).
So it seems like this bug cannot be attributed to an icon in particular but more generally to the TopIcon extension, GNOME Classic, GNOME Shell, or whatever GNOME plumbing is behind that.

I would be interested in testing with the default GNOME Shell + Applications menu + TopIcons + Window list (instead of GNOME Classic) but I’m not sure how to go about that…

#34 Updated by intrigeri 2016-03-16 14:16:55

> I would be interested in testing with the default GNOME Shell + Applications menu + TopIcons + Window list (instead of GNOME Classic)

My understanding is that GNOME Classic = GNOME Shell + apps menu + window list, so I doubt it’ll be any different.

#35 Updated by sajolida 2016-03-17 14:48:07

Reproduced today with only Clementine in tray icons.

#37 Updated by emmapeel 2016-04-16 17:16:18

intrigeri wrote:
> Interestingly, it seems to be that the bug is only triggered when one starts a Qt4 application (Vidalia, Clementine, KeePassX) that puts an icon in the notification area. Thanks to emmapeel for the idea, and to sajolida for the recent reproducer with Clementine!
>
You can thank me for sharing the idea, but it was actually anonym who realised it was triggered mostly with Qt4 apps…

Let me know if there is some ISO to test…

#39 Updated by intrigeri 2016-05-04 04:04:54

> Today I reproduced this when starting Pidgin (which is Gtk I think).

Thanks, this allows us to dismiss the “Qt applets don’t play well with topIcons” idea.

So we’re back at “topIcons + Window list extensions don’t play well together”. I’m very much tempted to propose we drop the list of windows, as a way to 1. transition further towards a regular GNOME Shell experience; 2. fix this bug.

sajolida, emmapeel: any one of you want to experiment with current Tails and the “Window list” extension disabled, and report back if this bug happens in that context?

#40 Updated by sajolida 2016-05-05 07:32:10

> So we’re back at “topIcons + Window list extensions don’t play well together”.

It’s the first time I hear about this hypothesis or at least I don’t
find any reference to it on this ticket. I’m not against it but for me
it was the topIcons as such which was problematic.

> sajolida, emmapeel: any one of you want to experiment with current Tails and the “Window list” extension disabled, and report back if this bug happens in that context?

I don’t mind trying this but I don’t manage to disable the window list
in Tails. It’s marked as “On” in Tweak Tool but it’s not disabled when I
turned it “Off”. The same applies to “Applications menu” but not to
other extensions, like “Top icons”, so maybe it has something to do with
the classical mode…

I also tried to override ‘org/gnome/desktop/session’ through a dotfile
in /etc/dconf/db/local.d/01_Pure_shell with:

[org/gnome/desktop/session]
session-name='gnome'

But it’s not applied and I still get ‘gnome-classic’ after restarting
and executing dconf dump '/org/gnome/desktop/session/'.

Any other idea?

#41 Updated by intrigeri 2016-05-05 08:53:25

>> So we’re back at “topIcons + Window list extensions don’t play well together”.

> It’s the first time I hear about this hypothesis or at least I don’t find any reference to it on this ticket. I’m not against it but for me it was the topIcons as such which was problematic.

I was confused, sorry. Forget the “Window list” part.

> I don’t mind trying this […]

Forget that part too. Sorry for the confusion!

#42 Updated by anonym 2016-05-09 02:28:57

Possibly related: I just booted a devel-build where I only have the GNOME Applications menu, not Places.

#43 Updated by sajolida 2016-05-09 16:49:04

Interesting… For what it’s worth, I’m facing this bug every day and never saw this.

#44 Updated by intrigeri 2016-07-18 07:53:38

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gnome-shell-extension-top-icons-plus (aka. https://github.com/phocean/TopIcons-plus) entered Debian today. So next step is to help sajolida and other affected people try it.

#45 Updated by sajolida 2016-07-18 12:49:44

Yeap, I’m fine testing this but as you rightly guessed, I’ll be more happy with more instructions…

#46 Updated by intrigeri 2016-07-18 14:48:07

> Yeap, I’m fine testing this but as you rightly guessed, I’ll be more happy with more instructions…

Of course :)

#47 Updated by intrigeri 2016-07-30 06:40:20

Sadly, TopIcons Plus is not compatible with Jessie’s GNOME Shell, so here are (untested) instructions for Tails/Stretch.

1. Use rootpw= to set a root password (since our Greeter is broken on Stretch), then go through GDM (iirc logging with amnesia/amnesia works).

2. As root run:

apt update && apt install gnome-shell-extension-top-icons-plus

3. As amnesia run:

gnome-shell-extension-tool --disable 'topIcons@adel.gadllah@gmail.com' && \
gnome-shell-extension-tool --enable 'TopIcons@phocean.net'

4. Then do whatever usually triggers this bug, see what happens, and report back.

#48 Updated by intrigeri 2016-07-30 10:00:27

intrigeri wrote:
> Sadly, TopIcons Plus is not compatible with Jessie’s GNOME Shell, so here are (untested) instructions for Tails/Stretch.

feature/stretch now installs TopIcons Plus instead of TopIcons. See Bug #11442#note-5 for tips wrt. using an ISO based on Stretch (warning: rough edges).

#49 Updated by intrigeri 2016-08-31 06:19:40

We see this bug a lot in the test suite on the devel branch since a bunch of my test suite work was merged a week ago. So it might be worth backporting to Tails 2.x the work I’m doing in this area on feature/stretch (see subtasks of Bug #8309), once our test suite shows that it actually helps.

#50 Updated by emmapeel 2016-09-25 02:06:27

I can reproduce quite often when using Gnotime. Less often with Keepassx. Also in Tails 2.6

Could not find more in the logs than the very spammy:

Sep 25 08:48:26 amnesia gnome-session[28320]: (gnome-shell:28464): mutter-WARNING : STACK_OP_RAISE_ABOVE: window 0x5c01400016 not in stack

#55 Updated by intrigeri 2017-09-22 05:27:36

I wonder if https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=781760 might be involved => anyone affected, please let me know if you ever see this problem on a Tails system whose screen has never been locked and where the screensaver has never been activated.

#56 Updated by sajolida 2019-06-14 11:41:14

I’m using Tails every day and was affected by this a lot in Tails 2.x but I don’t remember seeing in months (in Tails 3.x at all?).

I still see GNOME Shell restarting now and then but no missing widgets.

Maybe other daily users can confirm.

#57 Updated by intrigeri 2019-06-15 09:19:47

> I’m using Tails every day and was affected by this a lot in Tails 2.x but I don’t remember seeing in months (in Tails 3.x at all?).

This is good to know! Based on this feedback, I was almost going to close this ticket, assuming it was fixed by the upgrade to Stretch, but then I noticed that the problem has been seen once on 3.0, so it’s not that simple :/

On Bug #10576#note-6 I mentioned a way that helped me reproduce this problem (that’s quite clearly a race condition). It would be sweet if someone could try this with current Tails 3.x, and ideally with feature/buster. But no big deal if we don’t, because in any case, we have other good reasons than this ticket to do Bug #8309, starting with the GNOME Shell crashes sajolida still experiences (Bug #11188), and once we’ve done Bug #8309 we can close this very ticket.