[gutsy] KDE Basket crashes on startup

As the latest upload of basket to gutsy was on 10-07, the bug is certainly still present in gutsy-release. Luke: Could you please pack your ~/.kde/share/apps/basket and ~/.kde/share/config/basketrc into a tarball and post it here? If there is information in your basket which you don't want to publish, please copy ~/.kde/share/apps/basket somewhere as a backup and try to remove as much information manually before preparing the tarball, while making sure the bug is still reproducible.

My thanks for your reply.

The nature of the bug has changed somewhat. I ran aptitude dist-upgrade as of Friday, 26 October, 00:53 GMT. Running this update resulted in various KDE package dependencies for basket being updated since I originally installed Ubuntu (not Kubuntu) Gutsy 7.10 Release Candidate.

Now, when I attempt to run basket from the CLI, I get the following error output which differs from the error output I listed previously:

luke@t3985 ~> basket
QPopupMenu: (unnamed) Popup has invalid menu item
QPopupMenu: (unnamed) Popup has invalid menu item
QPopupMenu: (unnamed) Popup has invalid menu item
QPopupMenu: (unnamed) Popup has invalid menu item
QPopupMenu: (unnamed) Popup has invalid menu item
QPopupMenu: (unnamed) Popup has invalid menu item
QPopupMenu: (unnamed) Popup has invalid menu item
QPopupMenu: (unnamed) Popup has invalid menu item
QPopupMenu: (unnamed) Popup has invalid menu item
QPopupMenu: (unnamed) Popup has invalid menu item
basket: ERROR: Communication problem with basket, it probably crashed.

Other than the KDE library package updates, everything else is the same as before. I am using basket 1.0.2-2build2 (which I reinstalled again just to be sure) and I still briefly see the application, but then get an error dialog stating, "Could not launch Mail Client".

As per your request, I have included the basketrc text file. I looked into the basket data files under ~/.kde/share/apps/basket, but I can not find any way to remove the odd bits of private data. Some of the basket directories lack an html file, which makes it hard for me to sift through the data.

If you really need this information, I can go to my backup files and hopefully pull it out from there. Please let me know how you want to proceed. I appreciate your help with this bug, and am happy to help out as I am able.

Thank you,
Luke Seubert

I tested your basketrc. The configuration does not cause any problems on my system. I suspect it is something in ~/.kde/share/apps/basket or something in the environment basket is running in. Could you please check if basket works when logging in with a fresh user account? Alternatively you could temporarily move ~/.kde/share/apps/basket and~/.kde/share/config/basketrc somewhere else and try to run basket. If basket works fine in one of these scenarios it is your configuration in ~/.kde/share/apps/basket and I would urge you to post it here. If basket crashes with the error you posted previously it is something in your KDE environment and we don't need the data in ~/.kde/share/apps/basket.

The html files in ~/.kde/share/apps/basket/baskets/basket*/ and the ~/.kde3.5/share/apps/basket/baskets/baskets.xml file contain all your data. Before posting it just edit those files and replace strings containing private data with placeholder strings.

Cheers,
              Florian

I created a new user account, and from within that account, I launched basket. It worked fine.

I tried reverting basket and all its dependencies back to the Feisty versions. This did not work, resulting in the same error code as before. Following that failure, I restored everything to the latest versions found in Gutsy.

I then followed your advice, and temporarily moved my /apps/basket/ and basketrc files to another location. I started up basket, and it worked fine, creating a new basketrc file in the process. However, when I reverted to the original basketrc file, basket failed to start. I then moved out that original basketrc file, and tried to restart basket once more. However, unlike before, basket did not start, but crashed. During all of this though, I kept the new /apps/basket/ directory that was created when I first successfully started basket, after having moved out the original basketrc and /apps/basket/ files and directories.

So, here's the deal. If I move out the /apps/basket/ and basketrc files/directories, and I start up basket afresh, it works fine, and creates new, default/empty /apps/basket and basketrc. I quit basket. Then, when I try to restart basket, using the new, fresh files/directories, it crashes again.

Now, here is where it gets weird. I went back and created another new user account, and started up basket. It ran fine. I quit basket, and restarted it, and it ran fine. So while this problem does not happen in a new user account, in my old (very old) user account, it is a problem.

From what you have done, it looks like the basketrc file is good and works well. From what I have seen here, the files in ~/.kde/share/apps/basket/* are corrupted in some way, whether using old files or fresh, new ones. My guess is that this is a problem with something in the Gutsy operating environment, as I never had this problem with Feisty. But I have no idea why this problem should afflict my old user account, but not exist with a new user account. Any thoughts?

Meanwhile, if you still want me to go ahead and post my ~/.kde/share/apps/basket material, let me know, and I will do so.

FWIW, this bug might not be worth too much more effort. I checked the Basket homepage, and the developer is quitting, leaving the project open for a new developer. If basket isn't going to see any development work, especially conversion to KDE4, I might not continue to use it. Most disappointing - it is an exceptional note taking program - very powerful. Also, I see that nobody else has experienced this particular bug with basket, so this might be something very unique to my system.

Thank you,
Luke Seubert

I found a work around for this problem. It seems to be caused by using a custom icon theme that's missing some icons that BasKet uses. I was experiencing exactly the same problem today when I first leaned about basket and decided to give it a trip. However, launching BasKet with a new user account so the default KDE icon theme is used, or switching the icon theme back to the default one in KControl solves the problem for me.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

I've been running KDE3 Basket on Intrepid (KDE4), and it was working fine until I set my icon theme to GNOME. Then I started having the same problem mentioned above (Basket crashing after 2 seconds with the "QPopupMenu" error, after which it loaded my email client and tried to create an email to submit a bug report (which didn't seem to be working).
I set the icon theme back to Oxygen and the problem went away. (Thanks Yuachen Zhu).

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 352690, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.