How can I find out what is causing my gnome-panel to freeze? [closed]

About once a day my gnome-panel freezes.

How can I produce some sort of debug information to:

• Figure out what is causing the freeze or
• File a bug or see if its an existing bug

When gdb is attached to gnome-panel and the bug occurs I cannot get a stack trace out of gdb.

Reading symbols from /lib/libbz2.so.1.0...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib/libbz2.so.1.0
0x00007f7cefe10f48 in poll () from /lib/libc.so.6
(gdb) c
Continuing.

^C
^C

The "^C" is to show that once the bug occurs gdb stops responding to Ctrl+c and kill -INT.

The comments on this bug report on the same issue first point the reporter to a wiki page entitled Debugging a Program Crash and then to a page describing how to get a backtrace. Perhaps those will help you get the debugging info you need.

I answered a question about a similar problem with a workaround that may help you. It goes like this:

1. Create a script called delayed-gnome-panel.sh in your home directory and mark it as executable.

2. Edit the script to look like this:

   #! /bin/bash
   sleep 3 && gnome-panel &
   exit
   

3. Then edit /usr/share/applications/gnome-panel.desktop so that exec=bash /home/<user>/delayed-gnome-panel.sh.

Attach to the panel after it's frozzen.

$ gdb --pid=`pidof gnome-panel`
(gdb) bt full

Also make sure you have the necessary debugging symbols installed. At least libglib2.0-0-dbg and libgtk2.0-0-dbg.

To debug the gnome-panel from the beginning you can try:

$ gnome-session-remove gnome-panel
$ gdb gnome-panel
...
(gdb) run

You would need the debugging symbols in order to get something readable (ie gnome-panel-dbg).