Problem using Mate with 13.2

Hi all

After a completely seamless upgrade from 13.1 to 13.2 I installed the mate pattern and base stuff from YAST and logged into mate to try it out, but I get an error saying the gnome menu couldn’t be found, would i like to delete the applet? (I’m guessing I don’t want to delete the main gnome menu so i always hit do not delete) Then a seemingly infinite number of the file explorer windows open in the task bar and that’s pretty much the system locked as it keeps opening them until I reboot from the TTY

I’ve tried installing the Gnome pattern from Yast in case there was a dependency in there it required but there was no difference

Before I start delving into logs and getting exact errors etc which I can do later (At work at the moment) I’m wondering is this just a common caveat that I just haven’t managed to find out about or is there an easy or obvious fix?

Cheers for any help, sorry for the lack of more detailed errors, I’ll grab that later :slight_smile:

Just found out the file explorer is called caja and googled ‘infinite caja windows’

turns out this is an issue that’s constantly popping up in the bug list. doesn’t fill me with hope :’( unless this is just a symptom of that gnome menu thing and would be fixed if that was found…

Ok something has to be going wrong here. On my work laptop I’ve installed 13.2 in a VM (so from scratch and not an update from 13.1) and logging into mate gives me the EXACT same issue

The Panel encountered a problem while loading "GNOMEMainMenuFactory::GNOMEMainMenu".

Do you want to delete the applet from your configuration?

INFINITE caja windows in task bar

Hi again

I looked through YAST in the repos for Gnome and found gnome-main-menu

installing this fixed the menu error I mentioned earlier and i now have a computer button in the task menu - should this be added to the Mate pattern?

I’ll investigate the caja windows spawning in the taskbar but if anyone has any pointers that’d be great

Don’t use mate but it sounds like a bugzilla moment. Report problem to get it fixed

https://en.opensuse.org/Bugzilla

Added main menu bug

I’ve never used Mate either, just wanted to give it a try ha

Strangely, booting into KDE or Gnome and uninstalling all the Caja stuff in yast actually fixes it with absolutely 0 side effects that I can see so far, so there you go

I’m having the same issue, wanted to try mate got it from the main repo and I am having the same issues, installed gnome-main-menu the menu error disappeared, but the caja error continued, removed all caja logged in to mate but I see no Desktop environment as caja is supposed to provide it, whyle still in mate got a few caja packages and am trying to run it from terminal this is the error I get

:~> caja
Initializing caja-main-menu extension
Initializing caja-image-converter extension
Initializing caja-open-terminal extension
The program ‘caja’ received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was ‘BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)’.
(Details: serial 7 error_code 9 request_code 53 minor_code 0)
(Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

and a stranger yet is if I run caja with the sync switch it runs, better said I get no console error and the file manager starts?

ps. there is a caja-gnome-main-menu package too is it dependent on gnome-main-menu or are they in conflict?
could this error be caused by kde4’s display manager maybe mate/caja is dependent on gdm?

has anyone managed to get mate to run as it does seam like an interesting alternative DE.

Yes, I have MATE running, though I’m not using it at the moment.

I installed it in a secondary partition on my laptop.

Here’s what I did:

  1. I used the 64-bit DVD installer (but on a USB);
  2. during the install, I selected “minimal X” as the desktop;
  3. I mostly took defaults for the installed software, after that choice;
  4. I booted up the newly installed system. I was greeted with the XDM login screen and logged in there;
  5. that gave me an Icewm session;
  6. in the Icewm session;
  7. I did not have network; NetworkManager had not been installed, and wicked was running, using the network setup that I had configured during the install. But it wasn’t working. So I went into Yast and repeated the setup. This time, it worked. Maybe I had mistyped the password during install.
  8. Still running Yast, I started Software Management, and installed the MATE patterns;
  9. Still running Yast, I went to the “/etc/sysconfig” editor and changed the display manager to “lightdm”, so that I could make a choice of desktops.
  10. I rebooted.

Those were the main steps for the install. I logged into MATE and it almost worked. There were a few problems.

  1. Something about a bogus Gnome Main Menu. I told it to remove that configuration.
  2. There was no menu inside of MATE. But I was able to add one. I right-clicked on the panel, and selected “Add item”. That give me a menu of choices, and one of those choices was the MATE Main Menu. I selected that, clicked the “Add” button, and I had a menu.
  3. I later ran into a problem after switching to “NetworkManager”. It seems that no suitable “polkit” agent is started. So I manually started “/usr/lib/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1”, and was then able to use NetworkManager (via the Gnome applet).

Apart from those minor problems, it seemed to work well.

BUT:

I later tried on another box, where I already had installed KDE and Gnome. So I added MATE. And, as soon as I logged in, “caja” went mad adding infinitely many icons to the panel. I used CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to abort.

I could not find an existing bug report on this (I searched for “caja”). So I opened Bug 905808 MATE / caja gone mad

I think we might be missing a package in the official reposetory
according to a post here
mate-session spawns 10 x-caja-desktop windows on first login. · Issue #19 · mate-desktop/mate-session-manager · GitHub this is a known bug Bug 721590 – GSettings triggers all change callbacks of all GSettings objects
a solution to this issue might be delaying caja startup for a few seconds by editing /usr/bin/caja-autostart
this is a copy/paste from the github thread

Unfortunately, the issue isn’t cause by caja himself.
One reason is the /run/user/1000/dconf/ permission issue, the other reason is related to gsettings, see Bug 721590 – GSettings triggers all change callbacks of all GSettings objects .
As workaround i’ve add a 3 sec delay to caja autostart. You can increase the value on your systems, maybe it helps.

[root@mother rave]# cat /usr/bin/caja-autostart 
#!/bin/bash

sleep 3 &&
exec caja -n &

exit

Use 'sleep 6 &&' or a higher value.

this file seams to be packaged in mate-file-manager a search at openSUSE Software reveals that this package is available for openSUSE 13.1 and an earlyer version of Mate (1.6) but it can not be found for 13.2 and Mate 1.8

some packages seam to be missing, according to http://eiosifidis.blogspot.gr/2014/11/install-mate-on-opensuse-using-script.html
by installing these

sudo zypper in gnome-main-menu mate-backgrounds mate-control-center mate-dialogs caja mate-icon-theme mate-notification-daemon mate-polkit marco mate-session-manager mate-settings-daemon mate-desktop mate-panel caja-image-converter caja-open-terminal caja-sendto caja-share dconf-editor mate-dictionary mate-disk-usage-analyzer mate-icon-theme-faenza mate-netspeed mate-screenshot mate-search-tool mate-sensors-applet mate-system-log mate-user-share mozo python-caja atril engrampa eom gucharmap mate-applets mate-calc mate-power-manager mate-media mate-screensaver mate-system-monitor mate-terminal mate-themes mate-menus atril-caja caja-engrampa marco-themes mate-common mate-icon-theme-faenza-dark mate-icon-theme-faenza-gray mate-indicator-applet patterns-openSUSE-mate_basis pluma lightdm

the infinite caja windows bug is gone and mate starts fine, maybe the suse maintainer needs to edit the mate package list (I think it’s the same person who wrote the tutoorial I used for the above list)
anyhow I am liking the mate DE with openSUSE 13.2

I just tried that. I still have the infinite caja problem.

I also switched to lightdm haven’t tried it with kdm, it really works I don’t understand it?
I originally installed all mate- and caja- packages from yast, after using the above command I noticed 5 wore not installed, unfortunately I didn’t note what those wore I only remember zypper telling me 5 packages to download.

this is just an idea as I did something similar,
uninstall all caja-* packages from a different DE, loggin to Mate, and run the above command (install all these packages)

sudo zypper in gnome-main-menu mate-backgrounds mate-control-center mate-dialogs caja mate-icon-theme mate-notification-daemon mate-polkit marco mate-session-manager mate-settings-daemon mate-desktop mate-panel caja-image-converter caja-open-terminal caja-sendto caja-share dconf-editor mate-dictionary mate-disk-usage-analyzer mate-icon-theme-faenza mate-netspeed mate-screenshot mate-search-tool mate-sensors-applet mate-system-log mate-user-share mozo python-caja atril engrampa eom gucharmap mate-applets mate-calc mate-power-manager mate-media mate-screensaver mate-system-monitor mate-terminal mate-themes mate-menus atril-caja caja-engrampa marco-themes mate-common mate-icon-theme-faenza-dark mate-icon-theme-faenza-gray mate-indicator-applet patterns-openSUSE-mate_basis pluma lightdm

see what happens, you shouldn’t get the infinite caja windows bug, open a caja window from a terminal if you get an error note it, if caja starts normally logg-out and logg-in to Mate.

ps I recently installed cinnamon too I’m not sure if it installed an extra gtk package that fixed a dependency?

It shouldn’t matter which desktop you install them from. I installed while running KDE. There were around 10 new packages installed via your suggested command.

I don’t want to try installing from within MATE, when that infinite caja loop is sucking up all of the machine cycles.

Tomorrow, I’ll try with a new user account, to see whether there is some left-over configuration that is causing problems.

run caja in a terminal under kde (or what ever you use) see if it runs or if it gives you an error, for me it didn’t use to run it gave an X Window System error, now it runs fine.


The program 'caja' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)'.
  (Details: serial 7 error_code 9 request_code 53 minor_code 0)

Then it suggested that I run with “–sync” to investigate the error. But it did not report any error with “–sync”, other than one that is related to samba (which I am not running).

My bug report has a reply, I think from the MATE maintainer, indicating that this is awaiting an upstream fix.

That was easy.

I created a two line shell script name “caja” in “$HOME/bin”:


#! /bin/sh -
exec caja --sync

and now there is no more infinite caja.

Possibly, I have crippled caja. But a crippled caja is better than an infinite looping one.

Not to butt in but when I played with MATE I had same issue putting MATE on top of KDE or Gnome. Caja breeding like crazy.

But problem is well known, also up on their github I think. You can find link if you want :slight_smile: Seems you are thinking this is openSUSE issue? I doubt that or several distros make same mistake. Possible I guess.

More ways to skin a cat but here is what I copy and pasted as a reminder to myself, is from Cajas github, “issues” page I think.

If you need immediate relief, this was mentioned, “In the meantime this problem can easily worked around by editing the /usr/share/applications/caja.desktop file, changing the X-MATE-AutoRestart value from true to false.”

So at FIRST reboot I did not pick “MATE” but “Icewm” and then changed that desktop link.

Worked.

Fairly sure it is mentioned on these forums too.

Problem is of course I only found out AFTER having wasted time scratching head. Did send some “happy” thoughts to MATE devs. Or who ever is responsible. If openSUSE is to blame I will redirect them, lol. But my money is on MATE. Cant remember them blaming distros packagers and they would if relevant, why take blame for them?