cheese failing silently

[Matt Graham]

From: Dazed_75 <lthielster at gmail.com>
> Matt Graham <danceswithcrows at usa.net>wrote:
>> strace and strace -ff can be your friends if the process
>> that's failing silently is dying because of a missing file,
>> or a file that's not where it's supposed to be.

>> The main problem is that this approach won't help much with
>> programs that communicate with other programs over sockets.

> Apparently the strace slowed cheese down enough that in addition
> to seeing the cheese GUI come up and then drop as before, it
> stayed up long enough that I could see the web cam indicator light
> come on twice for a moment.

Well, that shows that *something* is working.

> {fd=9, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=14, events=POLLIN}, {fd=15,
> events=POLLIN}],
> 6, 99The program 'cheese' received an X Window System error.
> This probably reflects a bug in the program.
> The error was 'BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)'.
>    To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
>    option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
>    backtrace from your debugger if you break on the
>    gdk_x_error() function.)

X problem.  Somewhere in the lower levels of whatever this is doing,
it made a bad GTK+ or GDK call.  (Or if you're really unlucky, one
of those libraries is doing something stupid.)  Getting info on
this with strace will be difficult as X calls are typically made
over... yep, a socket.  Like the error says, you'd probably have
to compile with -g, run with --sync in gdb, and break on the
function mentioned.  Not the world's most fun thing to do.

> I think I will check again for a revision before I claw further
> back in the 1.2 MB log file

That'd be the easiest thing to try, see if they have another
point release....

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see