Bug#574244: Two minute iceweasel startup time, due to gconf trouble

Helge Hafting helge.hafting at broadpark.no
Tue Mar 16 23:18:01 UTC 2010


Package: iceweasel
Version: 3.0.6-3
Severity: normal


When I start iceweasel, even in safe mode, two full minutes pass before
the window appear. After that, browsing seems to work as normal.
But this waiting is not exactly interesting.

I get a small window with a big error message:

Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)

All the guesses are wrong. The network is up, including loopback. I don't use NFS, and the lockfiles
mentioned in the URL aren't there. "ps aux" reveals a process called /usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2
I guess iceweasel tried to communicate with that? There are no other processes with "gconf" in the name.

I wish this app would use a simple textfile for its config, instead of this complicated and bug-prone
attempt at communicating with _another process over a network_. The textfile approach works so well for many
other apps, some bigger and some much smaller than iceweasel. 

Keep it simple. A single config file under .mozilla. and no big directory tree there either. Well,
I know that won't happen, but one can dream. 


-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (800, 'unstable'), (700, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.33-rc5 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=nb_NO.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=nb_NO.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages iceweasel depends on:
ii  debianutils             3.2.2            Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  fontconfig              2.8.0-2          generic font configuration library
ii  libc6                   2.10.2-2         GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libglib2.0-0            2.22.2-2         The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgtk2.0-0             2.18.3-1         The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libnspr4-0d             4.8-1            NetScape Portable Runtime Library
ii  libstdc++6              4.4.2-9          The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  procps                  1:3.2.8-2        /proc file system utilities
ii  psmisc                  22.10-1          utilities that use the proc file s
ii  xulrunner-1.9           1.9.0.13-0lenny1 XUL + XPCOM application runner

iceweasel recommends no packages.

Versions of packages iceweasel suggests:
ii  latex-xft-fonts       1.6.5-1            TrueType versions of some TeX font
ii  libkrb53              1.6.dfsg.4~beta1-5 MIT Kerberos runtime libraries
ii  mozplugger            1.13.0-1           Plugin allowing external viewers t
pn  ttf-mathematica4.1    <none>             (no description available)
ii  xfonts-mathml         4                  Type1 Symbol font for MathML
pn  xprint                <none>             (no description available)
pn  xulrunner-1.9-gnome-s <none>             (no description available)

-- debconf-show failed





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