[GNC] GnuCash v2.6.19-1 has started freezing on Ubuntu 18.04 after a recent system update

[Adrien Monteleone]

> \On Oct 17, 2019 w42d290, at 1:49 AM, Parke <parke.nexus at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 9:11 PM Adrien Monteleone
> <adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> wrote:
>> I *think* a newer (3.x) release was backported to the Ubuntu 18.04 backport repos, but I could be mistaken. Search the list (or repos) for more info.
> 
> It appears not:
> 
> https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=all&exact=1&searchon=names&keywords=gnucash

Sorry, I was confusing things. It was libboost that was updated in bionic which should make building 3.7 easier. But I haven’t tried it in a while.

GnuCash is indeed still at 2.6.19 there.

> 
>> However, 3.x uses GTK3, so the transition might not be super smooth on OpenBox. (I’ve heard there are some issues with some apps, but mileage will vary)
> 
> Interesting.  I already have 19.04 installed on a test system, so I
> will test GnuCash 3.4 on Openbox and see what happens.
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 9:42 PM David Cousens <davidcousens at bigpond.com> wrote:
>> It may be worth looking at the GnuCash dependencies for 2.6.2 (these should
>> apply for 2.6.19) shown in https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Dependencies and
>> see if any were upgraded.
> 
> Is there an easy way to display what was upgraded when?  I don't know
> how to get apt to display that information.  And I don't manually
> track it.

That depends on how you did the update. If by apt in a terminal, there are several ways to see the upgrade/full-upgrade history.

You can view, grep, tail, etc. on:
/var/log/apt/history.log
/var/log/dpkg.log

Also both Synaptic & Software Updates have a history you can view for when those tools were used.

> 
>> Normally newer versions than the specified version
>> are OK. You should have the GTK2 libraries for v2.6. The GTK3 and GTK2
>> libraries can be coinstalled if other software requires GTK3.
> 
> It appears I already have both GTK2 and GTK3 installed on the Ubuntu
> 18.04 system.
> 
>> Have never experienced freezing problems in GnuCash but I use Evolution as a
>> mail client and it has produced a fault which wipes the screens and locks
>> the system. Hard disk indexation can sometimes lock the system up and deny
>> you access as well.
> 
> When GnuCash freezes, the CPU cores on my system are mostly idle.  So
> there is no CPU or disk bottleneck that I can see.

Try starting htop first, (a little better formatted than simple ‘top’) then launch GnuCash, observe the resource hit, and keep an eye on it. See if you can trigger the crash while watching htop’s output. And of course, check the tracefile. These wiki pages might be of interest, particularly the section on tweaking the tracefile and running from the command line for more output:

https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#Q:_Something_bad_happened.3B_how_can_I_help_debug.3F
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Tracefile

Regards,
Adrien