Some programs not opening. Just "starting" and then disapear

[wolfric]

Can't seem to open certain things. For example Synaptic Package manger. It just shows "starting" etc and then nothing. Same thing with partition editor and root terminal. Terminal runs fine (and i can su root from there) as do other things such as firefox, system monitor,update manager add/remove applications. apt-get still works fine. Just want to mention i have 500 megs of ram.

Any ideas? Are there logs dumped somewhere for this kind of thing? Synaptic package manager still runs using dpkg from the terminal.

[Bulkley]

If you use a terminal emulator (xterm, aterm, etc) to call a program, it will give you the error messages.

Synaptic requires root privileges. In my Openbox menu, I have

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gksu -g /usr/sbin/synaptic

. The gksu -g brings up a box for you to enter your root password.

[skorzen]

Also, almost every application save logs in files under some special directories. One is, for example, /var/log.

For example, if you,

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cat /var/log/messages

then you can see the latest events that happened in kernel.

But the first step of troubleshooting is running the program in the Terminal, like Bulkley said.

[cynwulf]

Same problem since I installed testing. Trouble is for me it's intermittent and Synaptic is the only program affected so far. I tried running it a few times from the terminal last night but it was behaving normally. I will try again later today. I forgot to check the logs as well!

[mzilikazi]

Terminal runs fine (and i can su root from there) as do other things such as firefox,.

You're not really running a web browser as root are you? If so, I'd suggest not as that's a great way for some exploit to root your box.

[wolfric]

no i'm not running a browser in root. It seems to be working now for some reason.