Hi,

When trying to start gnome terminal I get the following error:
$ gnome-terminal
Error constructing proxy for org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.Terminal: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ChildExited: Process org.gnome.Terminal exited with status 1



Kurt

The bug still happens with version 3.54.3-1.
It did not happen to me up to now, but started happening yesterday
(February 17) despite nothing was changed on the system. Version
3.54.3-1 of gnome-terminal was installed on January 26th and did work
properly before. IT suddenly stopped working yesterady.

The behaviour is that when trying to launch gnome-terminal from the
dash just does nothing, and trying to launche it from a shell buffer in
emacs or from an xterm does nothing for about 10 secondes, and then
stops with the dreaded message :

 # Error constructing proxy for
org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0: Erreur lors de l’appel
de StartServiceByName pour org.gnome.Terminal : Le délai d’attente est
dépassé

I tried launching it using dbus-launch or using a LANG=C as the locale,
as I have seenb reports about this, but this did not help.

You will find attached a partial output of journalctl when the problem
occurs.

I forgot to mention two points in my previous message that the
journalctl output.

The first point was that the journalctl output was obtained when trying
to launch gnome terminal explicitly with LANG=C, so the bug is not only
related to non-UTF8 locale as discussed in
<https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal/-/issues/7472>.
Regardless, my default locale is fr_FR.UTF-8 so it is not an UTF-8
problem.

The second point was that from time to time, gnome-terminal does
launch, perhaps once every 10 or 20 attempts, I don't know. Looks like
some kind of very frequent race condition, but it's only a wild guess
from me. I also have since yesterday other gnome things that lag a lot,
like evolution that sometimes freeze or takes a long time to open a
message composing window, I don't know if it is related.

best regards,
Luc

Hi again,

Investigating further on
  - the possible race condition,
  - the fact that sometimes gnome-terminal does appear
  - the fact it is really a client-server provess with some gnome-
terminal-server process implied

I tried as a workaround to launch gnome-terminal several times in row,
so the second launch would possibly attempt to connect to the server
the first launch would have tried to initialize.

It kinda works.

What I do is from an emacs shell buffer, I set up two launches in row
by just typing "gnome-terminal ; gnome-terminal". I sometimes get only
one terminal (I guess it is the second one), and sometimes I get both.
Another possibility is to try just once to launch "gnome-terminal", and
if it fails to try again immediately after getting the error message.
My interpretation is that the server process is delayed, and that the
second launch is finally able to connect to it, as if only one server
process would serve as many terminal as are opened by user, and that
this process would remain a few seconds.

Once at least one terminal is up and working, then I can open new ones
instantly, either from the command line (like the initial emacs shell
buffer), or from the dash by using right-click and "Nouvelle Fenêtre
(new window)".

Luc

Given that timing, I'm confident that this is not the same bug. It has
the same symptom, but is not the same root cause.

(Also, having upgraded GTK is not "nothing was changed", especially when
running a development distribution like testing/unstable.)

This is a known incompatibility between GTK 4.17.x and
xdg-desktop-portal-gnome (see #1096094). Please upgrade
xdg-desktop-portal-gnome to version 47.2-2 or later, which you will need
to install from unstable for now.

    smcv

Hi Simon,

Le mardi 18 février 2025 à 10:57 +0000, Simon McVittie a écrit :

gtk was upgraded on February 13th, so several days before the problem
appeared, and I did use gnome-terminal since then (I use it everyday).

Fine, I did this and it indeed solved the problem for me.

Thanks a lot for the quick answer!

best regards,
Luc