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I use Meld very frequently and it just started bailing on me today. When I try to run meld from commandline, it stalls for some time and then exits with Failed to register: Timeout was reached.

I did an apt remove, apt update and re-install and the issue is still there.

Any suggestions on debugging this?

Timothy C. Quinn
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3 Answers3

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Likely there's a meld process that hung in the background and wouldn't quit. Just kill the meld process with SIGTERM (or SIGKILL if SIGTERM doesn't work). No need to restart the machine.

Rufus
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For those who hit this issue, try restarting your machine. I found a closed ticket on the meld issue tracker and tried it and sure enough, the issue went away.

Timothy C. Quinn
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You asked for suggestions on how to debug this. So here's how I debugged this: I ran sudo meld and it worked. I then ran sudo su username for my username and meld worked in that window. Then I ran a env > blah.txt in the working window and env > blah_busted.txt in the broken window. I pulled up meld blah.txt blah_busted.txt to do a diff and began running unset VAR_NAME for each variable name that was defined in the busted.txt but not in the good one. Finally I ran:

unset XDG_RUNTIME_DIR

And meld magically worked again.

I'm running Ubuntu 22.04 via X2GO. I also had to 'unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS' in ~/.bashrc to get anything snap related to run via x2go. That's a known issue with x2go. It seems ubuntu does no regression testing via x2go, and I can't find any documentation on how/if ubuntu regression tests at all.

poleguy
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