Add/Remove Software seg fault/not showing

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1

Hi. 5 years old x64 GNOME (X11) Manjaro, up-to-date, with many AUR packages installed with Add/Remove Software (but no other package repository). No Flatpak/Snap, nothing very exotic.

Last week (around Dec 17, 2024) ) Add/Remove Software starting not to show up any window (when run from GNOME > Super key > list of apps).

When I run pamac-manager & in a terminal, I have repeatedly, but NOT consistently, received a segmentation fault error (with no real details). Now even that doesn’t show up. After starting that, for a while there are some processes:

ps aux | grep -i pamac
pkehl    1520009  111 16.9 2655424 1360124 pts/1 Il   11:07   0:15 pamac-manager
root     1520177  0.3  0.2 365688 16960 ?        Ssl  11:07   0:00 /usr/bin/pamac-daemon
pkehl    1520238  0.0  0.0   8920  2228 pts/1    S+   11:07   0:00 grep --colour=auto -i pamac

Then - but only occasionally, comes: [1]+ Segmentation fault (core dumped) pamac-manager.

The process root 1520177 0.0 0.2 365688 16960 ? Ssl 11:07 0:00 /usr/bin/pamac-daemon keeps being active - even after pamac-manager dumps the core.

If I then run pamac update -a, I get Transaction successfully finished. and the above deamon is ended.

pamac update -a seems to work, as does pacman. sudo pacman -Syu is up-to-date.

Same problem (or no obvious difference) with both 6.12.4-1 and 6.13.0rc2-1 kernel (as installed with pacman/pamac/Manjaro Settings Manager).

pamac-manager --version
Pamac  11.7.2-1

Surprisingly, running the following does show Add/Remove Software window, saying “Your system is up to date”:

pamac-manager --updates
MESA-INTEL: warning: ../mesa-24.2.8/src/intel/vulkan_hasvk/anv_formats.c:752: FINISHME: support YUV colorspace with DRM format modifiers
MESA-INTEL: warning: ../mesa-24.2.8/src/intel/vulkan_hasvk/anv_formats.c:783: FINISHME: support more multi-planar formats with DRM modifiers

But, if I then click at the leftmost tab “Browse”, MOST OF THE TIME, but NOT ALL THE TIME- says that Add/Remove Software is unresponsive, and Segmentation fault (core dumped) in terminal again.

But, VERY OCCASIONALLY “Browse” does show the packages.

Any tips, please? Or, how can I troubleshoot or get any relevant parts of reports/logs or the core dump (more below)?

2

Core dumps are around 199MB. Where/how can I upload/submit them?

ls -al /var/lib/systemd/coredump
total 2624688
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root    122880 Dec 23 11:14 .
drwxr-xr-x  12 root root      4096 Jul  2 23:52 ..
-rw-r-----+  1 root root 199414968 Dec 23 10:22 core.pamac-manager.2000.27eb6a43903f4acc881b50455f0c532a.1445968.1734978108000000.zst
-rw-r-----+  1 root root 199242374 Dec 23 10:33 core.pamac-manager.2000.27eb6a43903f4acc881b50455f0c532a.1452913.1734978779000000.zst
-rw-r-----+  1 root root 189417563 Dec 23 10:42 core.pamac-manager.2000.27eb6a43903f4acc881b50455f0c532a.1458080.1734979283000000.zst
.....
3

When using a gui you may not see the relevant error messages !
Edit:
Please try first to use (without sudo !): (This was wrong, you need sudo with pacman :frowning: )

sudo pacman -Syu

:footprints:
Since i do not use pamac, i am out.

4

As I wrote, sudo pacman -Syu is up-to-date.

See also my mention of core dump (in a separate reply). So there IS a problem/interaction with pamac.

5

Without sudo, running pacman -Syu fails:

error: you cannot perform this operation unless you are root.

1 Like
6

Sorry, my fault. I corrected it in my post, so nobody will take it from there.

With pamac i can’t help, because i do not use it any more. What i do use is trizen :footprints:

1 Like
7

Reported as Intermitent but steady Seg. fault, 199MB core dumps · Issue #476 · manjaro/pamac · GitHub.

8

Yes, GitHub is likely the best for this information. If there is any merit in the data submitted I’m sure it will be recognised.

Regards.

9

This is expected

pamac and pacman is different applications where pamac is the Manjaro specific package manager and pacman is the native Arch Linux package manager.

pacman provides a library libalpm to be utilized by 3rd party applications, e.g. pamac.

The Add / Remove Software is the GUI part of pamac - launched by the command pamac-manager

10

I don’t know about your system, but I just solved my pamac crashing by replacing pamac-gtk3 with pamac-gtk (gtk4 version then).

11

Thank you @deemon. I already have pamac-gtk 11.7.2-1 installed (and no pamac-gtk3).

❯ sudo pacman --query pamac-gtk
[sudo] password for pkehl:       
pamac-gtk 11.7.2-1

~ via  v21.7.3 via 🦀 v1.85.0-nightly took 3s 
❯ sudo pacman --query pamac-gtk3
error: package 'pamac-gtk3' was not found
12

Its a bit confusing of a suggestion anyways, as the opposite has been true for others …

Though thats a different issue.

And it makes more sense for a non-gtk desktop to maybe avoid gtk4 … while on Gnome the gtk4 version is reasonable.

I guess it might just be that both versions have some sort of breakage that presents differently depending on environment.

Lacking anything else … I might suggest clearing your caches, sorting mirrors, and those usual steps.

1 Like
13

Thank you.

For anyone’s reference, to install trizen, follow for example https://ostechnix.com/trizen-lightweight-aur-package-manager-arch-based-systems/. If you have yay, in a shell run yay -S trizen.

(EDIT:) yay will prompt for sudo (root password), unless you’ve run sudo in the same shell within a very short time earlier. (Thank you @cscs for the explanation below.)

14

yay and trizen are very similar.

They are both AUR helpers that are also frontends for pacman.

yay happens to be in the repos.

Both will prompt for sudo as needed - though this is also configurable.

( for whatever its worth - I use paru )

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers#Pacman_wrappers

You may note some differences include;

  • paru - Rust - Can use clean chroot and local repos
  • trizen - Perl - Only partial support for split packages
  • yay - Go - Allows batch operations, is in the repos

If you are unfamiliar with the AUR then please take the time to review the related documentation.
Everyone who uses the AUR should be able to give a PKGBUILD a cursory look and understand makepkg etc.

1 Like
15

While we’re on the subject, note that sudo is only needed when accessing or making changes to restricted files. Since the sync databases are readable by all, sudo is not needed when making queries. I try to follow the practice of using sudo only when it is actually needed.

3 Likes
16

Hi @peter-kehl, it seems I have just solved the issue on my Cinnamon desktop!

Resetting Cinnamon to default settings seems to have done the trick!
Doing this removed all my applets, but also made the bottom panel back to its original (much larger) size. As soon that was done, pamac-manager worked again.

I then added my applets back, one after the other, checking each time if pamac-manager was still working, and it was, so my conclusion for now is that the problem (at least here) was with the panel size (that indeed I made smaller a long time ago)…
I even rebooted a few times since, and it’s still working as expected, so that seems solved for good in my case!

If you haven’t done it already, perhaps you could try resetting your Gnome desktop settings to default, just to see if it helps? It might be worth a try…

EDIT: sadly, it seems that it was only a temporary fix!
After 6 days working as expected, pamac-manager started to segfault again :frowning:
I didn’t change anything on my system since then, the only noticeable event was an update of Firefox and Chromium yesterday…