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Upgrade to Xubuntu 19.10 fails. Final result is a continually crashing xfwm4

Submitted by Jeffery Small @cjsmall

Assigned to Olivier Fourdan @olivier

Link to original bug (#16374)

Description

Xubuntu upgrade have been very unstable for me during the past few upgrades. I finally felt forced to upgrade from 19.04 to 19.10 yesterday. As the upgrade was progressing normally, all of a sudden my two screens went blank. I waited for the upgrade process to recover but no luck. The upgrade was hung and there was nothing to do but login from a networked machine and force a reboot. It seems that every upgrade messes with the graphics drivers that render my Nvidia K4000 GPU hobbled or inoperable. Eventually, with some additional work reloading graphics drivers from the command-line I was able to get the system up in a crippled state without a window manager running. I did get synaptic started and discovered many packages which had failed to upgrade. I manually upgraded everything and rebooted, but there was little improvement as I could get a desktop on one of my two screens, but no window manager (xfce4) and no panel (xfce4-panel) which means no ability to conveniently launch programs, no way to move or close windows, display right-click or pull-down menus, and no way to get overlapping windows to expose what's below.

Here is what I find:

Related Running Processes:

    xfce4-session
    /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/im-launch startxfce4
    xfce4-panel --display :0.0 --sm-client-id 20da3c5bf-1f04-466a-aff5-038a666ce87f
    xfsettingsd --display :0.0 --sm-client-id 25a6c25ee-17d3-4acb-8330-a810ce1c1c24
    xfdesktop --display :0.0 --sm-client-id 270dae5dd-c0df-4c6e-9e50-8b5342b6df91
    xfce4-power-manager --restart --sm-client-id 284cadb86-e11c-4fac-bf79-b94245fff3e8
    /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xfce4/notifyd/xfce4-notifyd
    xscreensaver -no-splash

Notice there is no xfwm4. Every attempt to start this fails and there are core files in /var/crash:

    -rw-r----- 1 jeff whoopsie 3211964 Jan 12 20:22 _usr_bin_xfwm4.1000.crash
    -rw-r--r-- 1 jeff whoopsie             0 Jan 12 20:22 _usr_bin_xfwm4.1000.upload

aport.log messages:

    ERROR: apport (pid 5079) Sun Jan 12 20:22:38 2020: called for pid 5044, signal 5, core limit 0, dump mode 1
    ERROR: apport (pid 5079) Sun Jan 12 20:22:38 2020: executable: /usr/bin/xfwm4 (command line "xfwm4 --display :0.0 --sm-client-id 27f2d4ead-e803-4b48-9999-bcf20ff5baad")
    ERROR: apport (pid 5079) Sun Jan 12 20:22:38 2020: gdbus call error: Error: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.SessionManager was not provided by any .service files

    ERROR: apport (pid 5079) Sun Jan 12 20:22:38 2020: debug: session gdbus call:
    ERROR: apport (pid 5079) Sun Jan 12 20:22:39 2020: wrote report /var/crash/_usr_bin_xfwm4.1000.crash

    [messages repeat 5 times]
kern.log messages:
    Jan 12 20:22:38 dymaxion kernel: [   54.589712] traps: xfwm4[5044] trap int3 ip:7fc4d1afb8e5 sp:7fff265927e0 error:0 in libglib2.0.so.0.6200.1[7fc4d1ac0000+83000]

    [message repeats 5 times]
syslog messages:
    Jan 12 20:22:34 dymaxion dbus-daemon[4857]: [session uid=1000 pid=4857] Activating service name='org.xfce.Xfconf' requested by ':1.2' (uid=1000 pid=4863 comm="xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/theme -s Greybir" label="unconfined")
    Jan 12 20:22:34 dymaxion dbus-daemon[4857]: [session uid=1000 pid=4857] Successfully activated service 'org.xfce.Xfconf
    Jan 12 20:22:38 dymaxion kernel: [   54.589712] traps: xfwm4[5044] trap int3 ip:7fc4d1afb8e5 sp:7fff265927e0 error:0 in libglib2.0.so.0.6200.1[7fc4d1ac0000+83000]

    [message repeat 4 times]

    Jan 12 20:22:47 dymaxion whoopsie-upload-all[5097]: Collecting info for /var/crash/_usr_bin_xfwm4.1000.crash...

During my testing I marked both libglib2.00:i386 (which supplies /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgthread-2.0.so.0.6200.1) and xfwm4 for reinstallation, but this did not fix anything.

The following packages are all installed, although I do not think this is likely causing any problem here. I list them in case something should have been removed during the failed upgrade.

    libglib2.0-cil-dev      2.12.40.2
    libglib-2.0.0-0          2.1.0-1
    libglib2.0-bin           2.62.1-1
    libglib2.0-cil            2.12.40.2
    libglib2.0.0-0          2.62.1-1
    libglib2.0-0:i386     2.62.1-1
    libglib2.0-data        2.62.1-1
    libglibmm-2.4-1v5  2.60.0.1

    xfwm4                    4.14.0-1
    xfce4                      4.14
    xfce4-panel            4.14.1-0ubuntu1
    xfdesktop4             4.14.1-1

I'm unclear why the running panel process will not display, but it may require a window manager to display this. However, I just saw that a pannel-wrapper also crashed. I've placed the two crash files in dropbox which can be retreived here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/37546wgbwc6zq08/_usr_bin_xfwm4.1000.crash?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mzcrgrvnep7v6bb/_usr_lib_x86_64-linux-gnu_xfce4_panel_wrapper-2.0.1000.crash?dl=0

I'm currently stuck and would appreciate any pointers as to what to do to get this resolved.

Version: 4.14.0

Edited by Yousuf Philips