Inkscape on Ubuntu crashing when opening "Layers" dialog

[sagrawalx]

Hi there!

I'm running the latest stable version of Inkscape on Xubuntu 16.04 (kernel version 4.4.0-45), and I seem to be running into a kind of annoying bug: whenever I go to "Layer > Layers...", Inkscape crashes with the error message "Inkscape has encountered an internal error and will close now." I've attached a screenshot of the error message when I open a fresh document and the first thing I do is try to open the Layers dialog.

I've googled a bit but I haven't managed to find anything relevant about someone else having this issue, so I'm not sure what's going on. I'm sure I will probably need to share more information for anyone to be able to help me, but I don't really know what information to share, so just let me know!

Thanks!

[brynn]

Welcome to the forum!

Yes, that sounds like an annoying problem indeed!  When you say you're running the current stable version, could you tell us specifically which version?  Help menu > About Inkscape.  The reason I ask, is that my understanding of how Linux works, is that you get your programs from some central source.  And what we've sometimes seen is these places don't always have the latest version of Inkscape.

The current stable version is 0.91.  0.92 is due shortly, and 0.92pre2 is also pretty stable.

If you do already have 0.91, we'll have to investigate further.  Honestly I haven't heard this problem before, so I'm not quite sure where to start.  But maybe some other members have.  In any case, one step at a time.   

[sagrawalx]

Thanks for your response! I'm running Inkscape 0.91, it's what was in Ubuntu's repositories. I've also set up the Inkscape PPA (https://launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/+archive/ubuntu/stable) to make sure that I was running the latest version.

[Moini]

Never heard about that issue, either.

What I would try:
- uninstall Inkscape, make a backup of the /home/<username>/.config/inkscape directory and delete it.
- reinstall Inkscape

If it doesn't work correctly then:

- uninstall, delete inkscape user config directory
- reinstall Inkscape, current version, from the other source (not the ppa, in your case, I assume, but you can find out which version is used by typing:
apt-cache policy inkscape)

Please report back if any of that helped.

[Moini]

Oh, and also run it from the command line:

inkscape

and check the output there when it crashes.

[sagrawalx]

Awesome, 

I ran Inkscape from the command line and it told me the following.

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'Gtk::IconThemeError'

Emergency save activated!
Emergency save completed. Inkscape will close now.
If you can reproduce this crash, please file a bug at www.inkscape.org
with a detailed description of the steps leading to the crash, so we can fix it.
Aborted (core dumped)

So I went in and changed my icon theme and the error went away, I can now see the "Layers" dialog. Didn't need to reinstall Inkscape or anything.

I was originally using the Numix icon theme. I tried out all of the icon themes and I have installed, and that's the only one that seems to be problematic. While I'm not really sure precisely what "Gtk::IconThemeError" means, this definitely seems to be a problem with the Numix icon theme and not with Inkscape.

Thanks again for the help! I really appreciate it.

[Moini]

Mmh. That's a pity. The numix project advertises Inkscape for creating their icons... And then Inkscape crashes with them... Can you make a bug report there? (or for Inkscape, too. I don't think it should crash, at least... Maybe there's a way to catch the error before the whole program becomes unusable...)

But I'm glad that there's a workaround

[sagrawalx]

Alright, done!

https://github.com/numixproject/numix-icon-theme/issues/1160
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1639605