Nautilus error message by the hundreds, how to eliminate
 

I get 100's of error messages every hour from Nautilus in /var/log/syslog which is now 1.1GB in size. There are currently 2.4M Nautilus messages (over a half a million of those have the word "error" in them). I believe the errors, in one way or another, are slowing down the overall operation of my laptop.

Here are the error messages:
How do I eliminate these errors?

Can anyone help?

Hello EigenFunctions,

Is this Nautilus problem on the same system for which you have another thread going, concerning performance issues ? From what I remember of that other case, several symptoms pointed to a possible major corruption of your desktop environment (Gnome) and several of us recommended a reinstall given the scope of the issues you were experiencing.

This Nautilus problem, from the error message you pasted, references possible configuration corruption as well as permission issues. Without wishing to hammer the point incessantly, I really would recommend that you reinitialize your installation and start fresh. If, as I remember, your system came preinstalled with Ubuntu, you may have the option of reinstalling the factory image which is much simpler that installing from scratch. Worst case, with Ubuntu at least, even installing from scratch and then reinstalling your applications is relatively painless. Comparatively, looking for multiple granular fixes for the multitude of issues you are experiencing will be the equivalent of the proverbial needle-in-the-haystack analogy.

If you have already reinstalled or if this is a different system, apologies in advance - members here may be able to offer insight.

Cheers,

Using a hydraulic pile driver to pound in a tack to hang a picture is not, IMHO, a solution. This post is a way to solve one noticeable problem, instead of many (as opposed to my much, much wider original post). Using the term nautilus in the subject might catch the eye of an expert or two.

If reinstalling the entire OS, for every error, is the only solution (or the only prescribed solution), maybe my mistake is thinking linux is ready for prime-time when in fact, sadly, it is not. As bad as it is, for nearly 40 years from windoz 3.1 through and including windoz 7, I never had to reinstall the entire OS. During each of those versions, I used the machine heavily for years without having to reinstall.

So, is there a way to reinstall nautilus? Can I simply uninstall it and then reinstall it? If there is a configuration file (I wouldn't have a clue where to find it), can it be restored to the original?

Can anyone help?

By chance, I noticed this post:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1042...cause-problems

I did install PCmanFM, but according to that post above, it shouldn't be a problem. If I thought it would help, I'd uninstall PCmanFM.

Hi again EigenFunctions,

You can absolutely uninstall and reinstall Nautilus. If you can live with all of the other problems you're having and your Nautilus issue is related exclusively to Nautilus and not to other parts of Gnome, you may be able to fix your specific problem with Nautilus.

To do that:

... to remove nautilus. I would reboot afterwards before reinstalling, although this is, strictly speaking, not required.

.. to install Nautilus.

I am not a Nautilus user, so I cannot comment on its configuration files. I believe any configuration choices should be fairly simple to re-apply through Nautilus' menus.

PCManFM is simply another file manager, not dependent on Gnome and unrelated to Nautilus. Its presence or absence will have no impact on Nautilus' functionality.

Hope this helps - let us know.

Cheers.

I will try that and post the results.

Next question: can I simply (as root, of course) copy the /var/log/syslog to another name and set syslog (now at 1.1GB in size) to zero size?

Or, do I need, or is it best to use some special program to do that?

You can simply delete or move the log files to your home directory (or elsewhere), if you want to keep them, and the system will simply create and start new ones. Leave the directory structure intact, however (just move or delete the files, not the directories). And yes, you will need to do this as root or use sudo.

I Unistalled qPDFview, rebooted, reinstalled qPDFview. I think it improved some.

I explored the idea of doing the same for gEdit, but it seems like it is tightly coupled to many other programs, so I'm going to investigate more. Nautilus will be more involved and I'll have to wait until I have more time.

Hello EigenFunctions,

I believe qPDFview is qt based, so not dependent on Gnome. I am surprised you have noticed an improvement in Nautilus after removing and installing qPDFview.

As you have ascertained, both gedit and Nautilus are closely integrated into Gnome. You will notice more dependencies being affected when removing and reinstalling these.

Cheers.

Those error messages have, mostly, gone away. It may be because of some software update, I don't know.

But, now I get as many of the following message:
Does anyone know how to eliminate it?

Can anyone help?

I've never tried this but if you don't want a syslog then you can probably just symlink it to /dev/null, lol.
Edit:
Obviously, this really would get rid of the syslog, while allowing all the applications who expect to write to it to still function.

I really don't want to eliminate the message, I'd rather fix the problem. Besides, your suggestion would eliminate all messages and that's not something I would want to do in any event. But thanks...

Can anyone help find the source of the error?

As has been said, you can do log maintenance manually...there is, however, a program call logrotate that can be set up to automatically maintain log files.