Okular won't start

[gilado]

Every so often okular stops working.  I click an attachment in email, an icon blinks on the taskbar, then it disappears.

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ps aux | grep okular shows it is running. I run

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killall okular, checks that none are running, and try again. same problem.

I start okular from command line (konsole), nothing happens.

Here's the interesting part:

In konsole, I become root

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su - then try to run okular. It works!

Restarting the system make the problem go away ... until next time.

[muungwana]

when it doesnt start,run it from the terminal and report any output it may produce.

[gilado]

no output it just hangs there until I ^C

[muungwana]

can you start kwrite when okular stop working?

[wizard343]

Did you try to reinstall it?

[7272andy]

It could be down to permissions, entering ls -l /usr/bin/okular in a terminal should yield something like;

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 49644 Oct  9 01:30 /usr/bin/okular*

Regards

[gilado]

Turns out it's not only okular but any kde program, for example dolphin

If I try to logout, the desktop clear but the logout never completes.

The only recourse is to reboot, for example I ctrl-alt-f1 into the console, login as root and reboot.

[7272andy]

Try creating a new user and see if you have the same problem with that account

[muungwana]

Turns out it's not only okular but any kde program, for example dolphin

If I try to logout, the desktop clear but the logout never completes.

The only recourse is to reboot, for example I ctrl-alt-f1 into the console, login as root and reboot.

I suspected this.

I am seeing the same thing.My computer stays running and logged in all the time and the problem will always happen sooner or later.Havent found a pattern yet.

What i do when it happen is pressing "ctrl+alt+F4" to go to tty4,log in as root and then run "killall -u USER" and i will be brought back to the log in screen. This is ugly but it saves me a reboot.

Being seeing this behavior for ages now,across various kde updates.

[gilado]

Yes no kde application would start. I hit ctrl-alt-del to kill the UI and get back to the login screen. However once I login as the same user, kde initialization get stuck: the login dialog clears but I never get a desktop.

Switching to a console ctrl-alt-f1,  login as root and run the users command. It shows both root and my other user.  I switch back to the stuck GUI session (ctrl-alt-f8) and kill it again. In the root console I run users command again and indeed only root now is logged in.

However, when I run the ps command a few processes of my other user (which now is not logged in)  linger.  Especially suspicious is gam-server.  I kill it using the kill command. I switch back to the GUI (ctl-alt-f8) and login as my other user. Now everything works.

So I think the culprit is gam-server. Next time I'm not able to start new programs I'll try to just restart gam-server, see if the problem goes away.
 

[muungwana]

i can confirm gam_server is the problem.I clicked an application to open a file dialog and it hanged,the problem was back,tried to open kwrite and it wouldnt open,killed gam_server and things went back to normal.

just checked and gam_server is running again so it looks like it gets restarted when its killed.

[pinoc]

i can confirm gam_server is the problem.I clicked an application to open a file dialog and it hanged,the problem was back,tried to open kwrite and it wouldnt open,killed gam_server and things went back to normal.

just checked and gam_server is running again so it looks like it gets restarted when its killed.

what is and which package contains this gam_server?

[gseaman]

I think gam_server is from gamin.

Galen

[muungwana]

it looks like others have experienced the same problem: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=786170

[Texstar]

Gamin is a monitoring system for files and directories that independently implements a subset of FAM, the File Alteration Monitor. Running as a service, it allows for the detection of modifications to a file or directory. gam_server functions as a daemon for Gamin. Under Linux, Gamin uses inotify or dnotify to monitor filesystem activity. In the past gamin was used for instance if you copied a file or folder from one place the file manager would detect it and reflect the change in the application's window.