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[Petar Velkovski <pvelkovski@xxxxxxxxx>]

Any news on fixing this bug?

Can someone guide me with step by step instructions to generating crash
report files for this bug as I'm hit by it in the most dreadful way.
Browsing my directories containing pdf files (actually pdf books)
crashes my computer, resulting in a blank screen, a blinking led light
indicationg hard disk activity after which all I can do is press the
reset button and restart the computer.

I've been hit by this bug for the first time almost a year ago when I
was still using Ubuntu 12.04. At that time the crashes were so bad that
i couldn;t even start the computer unless I unplugged the electrical
cord since the computer simply refused to boot up again after pressing
the power button to turn it off and then pressing the power button to
turn it on again.

At that time I was convinced that it might have something to do with:
a) a failing harddrive
b) a failing  power supply
c) a failing motherboard 

I assumed option a) because I have multiple HD-s installed into my
computer. I use one of them specifically for storing ebooks (most of
them in pdf format). But then i realised that this crashes appear even
during a generation of pdf thumbnails on my main HD - the one that has
the operating system and my home directory on that at the time I started
having this problem was only a month old. Also I was getting kernel
messages about disk i/o errors labeled with date/time that coincided
with the crashes. Since I have 4 HD-s in my system and the crashes
happened during pdf thumbnail generation for files on each of them, I
ruled out this assumption about a failing HD.

Then I moved on to analyzing assumption b). I presume that having installed 4HD's in a system with an older power supply that was already built in the computer case that I bought at the time I bought the parts for my computer(which equals to a very cheap 
and mediocre power supply) could be the reason for the crashes. Since the crashes came soon after I installed yet another HD (a fourth one) it sounded reasonable that maybe the weak power supply is the culprit for the crashes. After making multiple tweaks with the HD cables (changind the PATA ports) etc and temporarily disconnection some of the disk I finally decided to purchase a better power supply since I was a bit desperate and since it would have been a cheaper purchase than buying a new motherboard. This didn't work either.

Then while looking for a new motherboard to buy - this is a core2duo
system and motherboards compatible with my processor and My DDR2 memory
are no longer easy to find I suddenly remembered that I added some pdf
related PPA to my system at the time that i started experiencing the
crashes. This was almost  3-4 months after I started having the crashes.
I uninstalled the PPA and suddenly the system crashes disappeared.
Although I still find it unbelievable that a user space program can
bring the system to its knees, it seams that this was the exact case!!!
After this I decided to be more careful with adding untrusted PPAs. I
even got the impression that the PPA package was even tampered with due
to the believe in the "mighty uncrushable linux".

All worked fine on my Ubuntu 12.04.5 system until few days ago I finally
decided it is time to do the upgrade to 14.04. Yesterday few days after
the upgrade, I needed to look for some of the pdf books stored on my
other drive. Since I wiped the thumbnail directory from my home drive
after the clean installation of Ubuntu 14.04.1 (I have separate / and
home partitions) nautilus has to recreate the pdf thumbnails. As I said
most of my pdf files are stored on a separate HD. Most of them are
e-books stored in multiple directories named by a subject. Some of the
directories contain 4 pdf files, some 20, some 100+. Opening some of the
directories containing pdf files work. All of the pdf thumbnails are
being normally generated. But certain directories are "dangerous" to be
opened. The thumbnailer manages to generate a few thumbnails and then my
whole system crashes.

Sometimes opening the same directory after the crash works. The
thumbnailer manages to generate the rest of the thumbnails. Just before
I sat down to write this comment i thought of new type of "test" -
copying the "problematic directories" to an external NTFS formated hard
drive. The first time I did this, it actually worked. I copied one of
the crashy directories to my hd, opened nautilus so that it would
generate the thumbnails for the pdf files contasined on the external HD
and it workeded. Then I erased that same directory from the internal HD
and then copied it back from the external HD. After this operation,
nautilus managed to recreate the thumbnails on the internal drive
without crashing. But I realized that this will not solve my problem
because after my seciond attempt to do it with other directories, MY
COMPUTER CRASHED while generating the thumbnails for the pdf files
copied and stored on my external hard drive.

Thanks god I finally managed to figure out that the bug is  related to
the evince-thumbnailer program from the evince package and not to the
libthumbnailer package that i previously thought was used during the
generation of the thumbnails and for which google didn't show any bug
reports.

Sorry for this long post that lacks any useful debugging information,
but please help me help you by instructing me how to generate useful
debug files, taking into account that after the crash my computer is not
in a usable state. It's not that I can normally use my computer with
such a critical bug since I tend to download and read pdf files on my
computer all the time and if the problem persists, I guess I'll have to
downgrade to ubuntu 12.04 as soon as possible.

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop
Packages, which is subscribed to evince in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1272613

Title:
  evince-thumbnailer crashed with SIGSEGV

Status in Evince document viewer:
  New
Status in “evince” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Crashed while browsing files

  ProblemType: Crash
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
  Package: evince 3.10.3-0ubuntu2
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-4.19-generic 3.13.0-rc8
  Uname: Linux 3.13.0-4-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 2.13.1-0ubuntu2
  Architecture: amd64
  CurrentDesktop: Unity
  Date: Fri Jan 24 23:12:50 2014
  EcryptfsInUse: Yes
  ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/evince-thumbnailer
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-03-22 (308 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" - Alpha amd64 (20130312)
  ProcCmdline: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.13.0-4-generic root=UUID=e6bf556c-894e-40f4-9373-8767c33004c0 ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=en_US
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SegvAnalysis:
   Segfault happened at: 0x7f4c4fa469d0:	cmpq   $0x0,0x30(%r13)
   PC (0x7f4c4fa469d0) ok
   source "$0x0" ok
   destination "0x30(%r13)" (0x00000030) not located in a known VMA region (needed writable region)!
  SegvReason: writing NULL VMA
  Signal: 11
  SourcePackage: evince
  StacktraceTop:
   ?? () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcairo.so.2
   ?? () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcairo.so.2
   ?? () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcairo.so.2
   ?? () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcairo.so.2
   ?? () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcairo.so.2
  Title: evince-thumbnailer crashed with SIGSEGV
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to trusty on 2013-12-16 (40 days ago)
  UserGroups: adm cdrom dip libvirtd lpadmin plugdev sambashare sudo

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