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This started to happen immediately after I had rebooted the first time after doing a system upgrade. It first starts with a dialogue that says "System program problem detected". Then when I try to hit 'report problem' not much happens. I am led through a dialogue that always ends up the problem cannot be solved.

I am aware this is not a lot of information, however I'm not sure which information I need to publish and how should I obtain it to debug this problem.

Here's a screenshot! enter image description here

Braiam
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grrrbytes
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6 Answers6

408

Open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and type:

sudo rm /var/crash/*

Then hit Enter.

This will remove any old crashes, that might still be reported (in error). After a reboot/re-starting, any further pop-ups still need to be investigated.

Jorge Castro
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Jason
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140

Disabling error-reporting is not a desirable solution!

Ubuntu has an error reporting system called apport which tries to catch all program crashes in the background and report them to help the developers.

It seems that after a dist-upgrade there are some stuck reports that continue to display for unclear reasons, but disabling apport is not a desirable solution.

Remove old crash-reports

Open a terminal and remove all old crash-reports that might exist in the crash-report directory:

sudo rm /var/crash/*

After a reboot the popups are gone.

If you don't want to reboot, you can close all open popups with:

killall system-crash-notification

(Any further new pop-ups still should be investigated. If you want to see the details,
look in /var/crash/ for any new reports)

Community
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rubo77
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60

Here's how to disable Apport, the system that reports errors to Canonical:

Open your terminal and type:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/apport

And hit Enter.

Change enabled=1 to enabled=0, then save and exit.

See also: How do I enable or disable Apport?

Ziyaddin Sadygly
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14

I have had the same problem when upgrading from 12.04 to a higher version. As it turns out, Ubuntu has an error reporting system called "apport", which was deactivated in stabled releases of Ubuntu until 12.04 and is reactivated now.

Manuel Jose has made an excellent quick-guide how to turn off the error reporting in apport

rubo77
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ubuntu_fan_dk
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2

Late apport releases have blacklist feature

There are already some examples in /etc/apport/blacklist.d/ like wine-preloader, firefox & thunderbird because all have their own crash handler (for direct upstream bug reporting).

  1. So just create a new file in /etc/apport/blacklist.d/.
  2. Put the absolute path of the executable in it.

Even after reporting, fix may take time to be released. It is Okay with temporary disabling few programs. I don't recommend disabling Apport completely, as you may miss crashes from important & production programs.

# Blacklist for apport
# If an executable path appears on any line in any file in
# /etc/apport/blacklist.d/, apport will not generate a crash report
# for it. Matches are exact only at the moment (no globbing etc.).

source: /etc/apport/blacklist.d/README.blacklist

I copy my answer to here from the linked post Ignore specific program's crashes in apport , as Apport get such new feature in the current Ubuntu releases.

user.dz
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1

If you would like to turn off the config setting without using a GUI:

sudo crudini --set /etc/default/apport '' enabled 0
gavin
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