GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 547032
Tomboy fails to launch for second session of current user
Last modified: 2016-10-15 17:05:47 UTC
Please describe the problem: If Tomboy is added to the panel, it crashes on startup for the second session of the current user. Steps to reproduce: 1. Add Tomboy to the panel 2. Enable multiple logins for the same user via Administration-Login Window General tab 3. switch user and login a second time for the current user 4. Tomboy will fail to launch. This dialog will be seen 3. You will see the following error "The panel encountered a problem while loading "OAFIID:TomboyApplet" The error can also be encountered if you logon remotely to a machine where you already have a session running (this is how I encountered it and why it is worth fixing) Actual results: Tomboy fails to launch, and an error message is encountered. Expected results: The session should start Does this happen every time? yes Other information: a workaround is to add tomboy to the session start up programs. Unfortunately, it then always launches a dialog showing all existing tomboy notes.
Tomboy is meant to be a single-instance app, which is enforced through d-bus. I guess what's happening is that even with two sessions, a user only gets one session bus? In that case, your second session is just running as a d-bus client of the first session's Tomboy instance. You certainly don't want two instance of Tomboy simultaneously accessing your note data. As you've found, running the second session's Tomboy in the notification area (instead of the panel) works around the problem. I'm not sure if there's anything we can do to allow multiple instances of the Tomboy applet in the panel; and if we can, I'm not sure if we will prioritize that. Running two sessions for the same user seems generally to be a bad idea. Patches welcome, of course.
Perhaps the error message could be more informative?
Also, how is running it via the notification area different that running it via the panel?
It would be nice if the error message could be more informative; unfortunately I don't know if that's possible. The only difference between running it in the panel and running it in the notification area is where the Tomboy icon shows up, basically. Also, GNOME has a few additional rules and restrictions it does when an application is running as a panel applet. You don't lose anything by running it in the notification area.
Pardon me if I'm missing something :-) but you say there is no practical difference between the two ways of running Tomboy. However, you also said that the error when trying to run it twice via the panel is fortuitous because running tomboy twice for the same user is a bad idea. If it's lucky that this generates an error, will bad things happen with the workaround? Is there a different bug: tomboy should stop a user running twice via the notification area? Anyway, even if the bug is low priority, can you confirm it?
This problem was reported against a version which is not supported anymore. Could you please check again if the issue you reported here still happens in a recent version of GNOME and update this report by adding a comment, adjusting the 'Version' field, and resetting the status of this bug report from NEEDINFO to its previous status? Without feedback this report might get closed as INCOMPLETE after a while. Again thank you for reporting this problem. We are sorry that it could not be fixed for the version that you originally used here.
Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug report if you can provide the information that was asked for in a previous comment. Thanks!