Time In Ubuntu

Linux and Unix-Like Ubuntu
1

Seem that I am having an issue with the time display in Ubuntu 10.4

Ever so often the clock will stop. What I have figured out is that a zombie process will show up in the TOP display. When I kill the PPID, I get a message asking if I want to restart CLOCK. When I restart, the time and temp reappear on my task bar and are correct. However; a few hours later (unsure of actually how long) the same thing will happen again.

Any ideas on what may be causing this? Also was wondering if there was a way to track down the parent that launches CLOCK, may be that there is an error in that program that is causing CLOCK to stop.

Thanks for the help

EDIT: Some additional information. I was able to determine what script was causing the problem with HTOP.

/usr/llib/gnome-panel/clock-applet --oaf-active-iid=OAFIID:GNOME Clockapplet Factory --oaf-ior-fd=19

Not sure if that will help, but I thought i would add this as well.

2

Sounds like a bug. The clock applet may have missed the SIGCHLD signal somehow, so isn't aware the process it spawned has finished and waits forever. Or it's just frozen entirely.

Running that applet with strace so it saves a file of what system calls it runs may help track down what it's freezing on or what have you, but if it really takes hours to manifest itself that file could get enormous very quickly.

3

I ran the strace, and didn't see anything odd.

Decided to just do a reboot and see if that will fix the problem.

I'll keep an eye on it and update here if it happens again.

Thank you for the help.

---------- Post updated at 02:17 PM ---------- Previous update was at 01:43 PM ----------

Well, after the reboot, CLOCK stopped on me again.

May need to post this as a bug, or at least look into and see if anyone else has reported this.

4

Not looking for odd things, looking for what system call the clock program was freezing on, i.e. the very last one.

5

These are the last few lines of the strace:

open("/usr/lib/gconv/gconv-modules.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3
fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=26048, ...}) = 0
mmap2(NULL, 26048, PROT_READ, MAP_SHARED, 3, 0) = 0xb779e000
close(3)                                = 0
futex(0x759a8c, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 2147483647) = 0
write(2, "Cannot parse arguments: Unknown "..., 70) = 70
exit_group(1)

I have also attached the strace file.

6

Try the following command

touch /etc/ld.so.nohwcap

I think you get lost in linker lala land looking to load specialty hardware-optimized runtime libraries that are not there. You can undo it with

rm /etc/ld.so.nohwcap