GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 314457
text/plain documents on my desktop disappear
Last modified: 2005-09-29 15:26:15 UTC
Distribution/Version: Ubuntu I have no idea how to reproduce this, but it has happened seemingly at random 3 times in the last 2 days. All documents of type text/plain just vanish from the desktop. Checking in a terminal with ls lists them normally, and I can open and edit them as normal. Focusing the desktop and hitting F5 (refresh), or killing nautilus, brings them back. After mentioning the issue in #bugs, Luis assured me I wasn't crazy, and that he had seen it too. CC'ing him.
I can confirm that this happens, though I can't get it to happen predictably yet. :/ Marking showstopper because it is so highly visible.
I just noticed all the toolbar icons in Synaptic had disappeared. Possibly related? Hovering over each toolbar items "hitbox" brings them back.
Created attachment 51333 [details] missing widgets I have no idea if this is related to the original bug report, but it seems related to my last comment about toolbar icons disappearing. This is a cut from Synaptic. The left side is a screenshot of when the controls show, and the right side with the controls missing. "Restoring" and then maximizing the window again fixes the issue.
Some notes that may be worth mentioning: * text/plain files have preview icons (I see their content inside the icon) * I have other preview documents (PDF, PNG) on my desktop, but they did NOT disappear. * Right-clicking -> Sort files by name (or whatever the english GNOME says) did NOT redraw the text files, but F5 did (as previously noted).
* text/plain files have preview icons (I see their content inside the icon) Note that I was seeing this (with clearlooks) and then switched to a theme without the .txt previews, and haven't seen it since. Might be coincidence, might not.
Created attachment 51343 [details] screenshot of a document missing Here is a screenshot showing the "common properties dialog GNOME 2.14.txt" document missing from the desktop (no, it's not under the terminal :-). This is quite weird; all the other times every text/plain file has disappeared, but now it's only one ... The red square illustrates where it "returned" after I pressed F5 (Refresh).
I have seen this effect with a set of text/html documents. I wasn't using the desktop at the time (typing into a window - I don't recall exactly what app) and saw it happen out of the corner of my eye; I didn't realise exactly what had happened until they reappeared when I started the computer again. At about the same time I had other troubles with the icon theme. I use an unsaved custom theme (so it still has the name Custom Theme in the theme prefs dialog) and whatever it had been pointing to for icons went away after an upgrade (this is Ubuntu Breezy, so I following along and can't remember exactly what was upgraded). I reset the icon theme in the dialog and haven't had a problem since. I am now using the GNOME default icons, and had thought I was beforehand. Quite possibly just a coincidence, I can't remember if the timing was right for the two things to be related.
Could this be a gamin bug? I was seeing random objects disappearing from the desktop with older versions of gamin (and older kernels without inotify) but upgrading to kernel 2.6.13-rc3 (that has inotify support) seems to have fixed that. Latest breezy kernels seems to have inotify support, maybe you could check if upgrading helps?
I'm running breezy with the latest kernel with inotify support and the clearlooks theme.
It certainly sounds like the file gets a "removed" even inside nautilus. This is mostly only triggered by fam (except when you e.g. remove a file from nautilus yourself), so it could easily be a fam or inotify issue. Of course, it could also be something else...
How to reproduce. This worked for me right up until the point I opened the theme dialog to test Luis' theory about it being the preview. Now I can't reproduce it anymore :(. On a Breezy system: 1) Have a .txt document on your desktop (my comment about .html documents doesn't seem to apply anymore). 2a) Run 'sudo /etc/cron.daily/slocate' *or* 2b) Run 'slocate -U ~/Desktop -o ~/temp.db' if you want to be quicker about it. 3) Wait - at some point in the scan the files will disappear from the desktop. 4) Refresh the desktop and the files reappear. I am using the latest Breezy kernel. gamin is version 0.1.5-0ubuntu1. Inotify is compiled into the kernel and exporting stuff into /proc so as far as I can tell it is working.
I am unable to reproduce with the guidelines in comment #11. In any case, if the locate db/gamin/inotify is causing this, comment #2 and comment #3 don't seem related ... File another bug for those? Could it be that the applications I see it happening in (controls don't redraw) are not recompiled with the latest cairo or something?
I can't reproduce as in #11 either.
This is probably yet another inotify issues. According to [1], most of them were fixed in kernel 2.6.13. Resolving as NOTGNOME. Feel free to reopen this bug report if you still get this issue after upgrading to the newest linux kernel. [1] http://blogs.gnome.org/view/ryanl/2005/09/01/0
I'm not at all sure that anything described in that link would cause this behaviour, but it is likely that gamin, dnotitify, gamin or fam is involved in this problem. Since this is on the 2.12 milestone it seems sort of frivolous to just close it NOTGNOME and claim some new kernel fixes it without even testing that!
The steps I described in #11 have stopped working for me (when I wrote it they worked five times in a row), but I'm still seeing this bug with the latest Ubuntu Breezy kernel (2.6.12-8). They mention no inotify changes in the latest ChangeLog entry (although they did update it in the 2.6.12-7 release, but I wrote comment #11 using that kernel).
Filed bug 315158 about comment 2, 3 and 12.
I can confirm that the problem still happens on a vanilla 2.6.13 kernel on my system. What I did was just mass-extracting a few tarballs on the desktop and suddenly the two textfiles I pu there earliey where gone.
It just happened again, this time I was doing absolutly nothing, just browsing the web and saw those same 2 files disappear besides the browser window. No terminals etc open doing stuff releated to the filesystem, also no cron jobs running. Latest kernel/gamin
Upstream here -- http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5279
This is definitely a kernel (inotify) bug with a patch that's verified to fix it. Closing.
Is the above link to upstream kernel valid? It doesn't seem to be the right one... also you mention that there's a patch, is the patch for 2.6.13 vanilla?
The link *is* correct. bugzilla.kernel.org is incorrect. The bug, as filed, no longer exists on their bugzilla. I'm guessing that they had some sort of a crash and had to restore from older backups. Several different patches to fix the problem in slightly different ways have been posted on the Ubuntu bug -- http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=14967