Bug 74604

Summary: evolution crashes starting -- Configuration Database not found
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Chris Ricker <chris.ricker>
Component: ORBitAssignee: Havoc Pennington <hp>
Status: CLOSED UPSTREAM QA Contact:
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: high    
Version: 8.0CC: katzj
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: MoveUpstream, Triaged
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2003-01-13 04:01:29 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
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Description Flags
strace of crash none

Description Chris Ricker 2002-09-27 16:01:12 UTC
This is with RHL 8.0

I did an everything install, and started using evolution.


When I logged in this morning, evolution fails to start.  It reports:

"Cannot initialize the Ximian Evolution shell:  Configuration Database not found"

in a dialog box, and


evolution-shell-WARNING **: Cannot access Bonobo/ConfigDatabase on wombat:
(IDL:OAF/GeneralError:1.0)

in the xterm I'm launching it from....

This appears to be a different issue than Bug #68412, since I've not changed any
packages from a stock RHL 8 everything install (other than adding acroread)

Comment 1 Jeremy Katz 2002-09-27 19:49:02 UTC
What happens if you just try to run wombat by hand from a terminal?

Comment 2 Chris Ricker 2002-09-27 20:02:44 UTC
It's probably too late now.  I went about systematically whacking config files
until it got fixed:

* first removed ~/evolution (didn't fix)
* then removed ~/.* (anything vaguely gnome / gtk+ / etc. related; didn't fix)
* then removed /tmp/* && /tmp/.* (after init 1; that fixed it)

Now things are working again.  It's since died on me a second time, but this
time evkill was enough to get it going....

Just for my future reference, what *should* I have done when I got that error
message?

Comment 3 Jeremy Katz 2002-09-27 20:08:07 UTC
Running wombat by hand probably would have given a more verbose error message. 
If what you did fixed it, did you by chance have had like a /tmp/orbit-username
that wasn't owned by your user?

Comment 4 Chris Ricker 2002-09-27 20:16:55 UTC
That's quite possible.  I removed everything in /tmp as root b/c the normal user
didn't have permission to delete the kde-* and orbit-* directories there....  I
didn't note the permissions on the directories explicitly, though.

(you'll probably have to close this as WORKSFORME or something similar, given
the lack of info on my end ;-)

Comment 5 Jeremy Katz 2002-09-27 20:55:03 UTC
Guessing it has to do with that then

Comment 6 Chris Ricker 2002-09-27 20:59:42 UTC
Okay, it's broken again.  This time I promise not to fix it so that you can
diagnose it ;-)

When I start evolution, I get

chilton@dartagnan chilton]$ evolution

evolution-shell-WARNING **: Cannot access Bonobo/ConfigDatabase on wombat:
(IDL:OAF/GeneralError:1.0)
[chilton@dartagnan chilton]$ 

So then I try starting wombat:

[chilton@dartagnan chilton]$ wombat
wombat-Message: Starting wombat


And that seems to work fine.  It's running now.

But evolution still won't start:

[1]+  Stopped                 wombat
[chilton@dartagnan chilton]$ bg
[1]+ wombat &
[chilton@dartagnan chilton]$ evolution

evolution-shell-WARNING **: Cannot access Bonobo/ConfigDatabase on wombat:
(IDL:Bonobo/Moniker/InterfaceNotFound:1.0)
[chilton@dartagnan chilton]$


Comment 7 Chris Ricker 2002-09-27 21:00:31 UTC
/tmp looks fine:

[chilton@dartagnan tmp]$ ls -l
total 5776
srw-------    1 chilton  chilton         0 Sep 27 13:19 gaim_chilton.1713
-rw-------    1 chilton  chilton       991 Sep 27 13:19 gaimNxhQOZ
-rw-rw-r--    1 chilton  chilton      9728 Nov  3  1999 GLFb3bb.tmp
-rw-rw-r--    1 chilton  chilton     53248 Aug  7 22:24 installutilities.dll
drwx------    2 chilton  chilton      4096 Sep 27 13:37 kde-chilton
drwx------    2 chilton  chilton      4096 Sep 27 13:38 ksocket-chilton
drwx------    2 chilton  chilton      4096 Sep 27 14:59 orbit-chilton
drwx------    2 chilton  chilton      4096 Sep 27 14:55 ssh-XXzVvGCW
-rw-------    1 chilton  chilton   5804688 Sep 27 13:36 stamps.exe
drwxrwxr-x    2 chilton  chilton      4096 Sep 27 13:52 tmp
[chilton@dartagnan tmp]$



Comment 8 Chris Ricker 2002-09-30 19:43:17 UTC
Created attachment 77744 [details]
strace of crash

Comment 9 Chris Ricker 2002-09-30 19:44:10 UTC
attached a strace -f of it failing to start

Comment 10 Jeremy Katz 2002-10-11 16:05:51 UTC
And then if you move /tmp/orbit-chilton out of the way, it starts working again?

Comment 11 Chris Ricker 2002-10-11 16:20:58 UTC
Yes

Comment 12 Jeremy Katz 2002-10-11 21:35:05 UTC
Havoc -- do you have any ideas here?  It looks like something strange with ORBit
to me

Comment 13 Havoc Pennington 2002-10-11 21:44:07 UTC
I thought the "configuration database not found" stuff was in the evolution FAQ?

Comment 14 Jeremy Katz 2002-10-11 21:48:59 UTC
The FAQ handles cases where the oaf files don't get installed and where
mozilla-nspr isn't installed for some reason.  Since moving the orbit dir out of
the way fixes it in this case, neither of those seem to be the case.

Chris -- do you have any problems with other GNOME 1.x apps that use ORBit like
gnumeric when this happens?

Comment 15 Chris Ricker 2002-10-11 22:34:07 UTC
I haven't noticed other problems, but I might have missed it (can't think of any
gnome 1.4 apps used regularly besides evolution).  When it breaks again, I'll
try out gnumeric.

Comment 16 Chris Ricker 2002-11-13 00:11:03 UTC
When it breaks, gnumeric is also broken, with a missing configuration database
error....

The initial problem (evolution not starting) is fixed by evolution-1.2.  I put
the rpms

[root@dartagnan bins]# rpm -qa | grep ximian
libgal21-0.21-1.ximian.1
gtkhtml-devel-1.0.4-6.ximian.1
bonobo-conf-0.16-1.ximian.1
libbonobo-conf0-0.16-1.ximian.1
libgtkhtml1.1-3-1.1.6-1.ximian.1
soup-0.7.9-1.ximian.1
gal-0.21-1.ximian.1
gtkhtml1.1-1.1.6-1.ximian.1
evolution-1.2.0-1.ximian.1
gal-devel-0.21-1.ximian.1
libgtkhtml20-1.0.4-6.ximian.1
[root@dartagnan bins]# 

on the system and it at least starts and runs now....

Comment 17 Chris Ricker 2002-11-13 16:16:53 UTC
Hmm.  This morning evolution 1.2 was broken (standard db error) but gnumeric
still worked....

A reboot fixed evolution, at least for the time being.

Comment 18 Havoc Pennington 2003-01-12 22:41:47 UTC
I don't really have a clue here, suggest we file on gnome.org and see 
if they're familiar with it.

Comment 19 Havoc Pennington 2003-01-13 04:01:29 UTC
Upstream as http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103323