In a unity-2d session on an Oneiric i386 system with gedit 3.1.1-0ubuntu4 and unity-2d/unity-2d-places 3.8.10-0ubuntu2, running gedit from unity-2d-places (by clicking the home button, typing in gedit, and clicking Text Editor in the search results; or by pressing Alt+F2, typing in gedit, and pressing enter) almost always results in gedit sleeping indefinitely and never becoming usable or creating any visible windows:
ek@Zim:~$ ps ax | grep -v grep | grep gedit
1911 ? Sl 0:00 gedit
When this happens, I see the gedit icon appear in the unity-2d launcher for a short time, but then the icon disappears (and gedit continues running nonfunctionally in the background). Usually, gedit can be killed by SIGTERM; occasionally, it seems that SIGKILL is required. On rare occasion, gedit runs successfully when launched in this way.
When I run gedit from a Terminal window (by running the command: gedit), it almost always works correctly, but on rare occasion, it sleeps indefinitely (in these cases, ps shows it as having state Sl+ rather than Sl, but I don't think that's a relevant difference). In these cases, SIGINT (from Ctrl+C) and SIGTERM have always been successful at terminating it, but I have only gotten the problem to occur a few times when running gedit from the Terminal.
When I run gedit from unity-2d-launcher (I am able to pin it to the launcher when it is running from the Terminal), it also works OK. I have not run it from the launcher frequently enough to know if it ever fails when launched that way, though I suppose it probably does.
I strongly suspect that this is due to a deadlock. I would be pleased to attempt to furnish any further information required for the investigation of this bug.
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: gedit 3.1.1-0ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-4.5-generic 3.0.0-rc6
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-4-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Jul 11 13:15:44 2011
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gedit
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Alpha i386 (20110705.1)
ProcEnviron:
SHELL=/bin/bash
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
SourcePackage: gedit
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
Pedro, could you look at this please, it seems to be a problem when gedit is launched directly from a terminal as well. IIRC there are dups.