Hi,

I am using Inkscape 0.48.4 r9939 running on Lubuntu Trusty Tahr (Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS).
I am not a new user to Inkscape, having used it for several years under Windows XP. I switched to Lubuntu about eight months ago. I now have a dual-boot Lubuntu and Windows XP sytem.

Whenever I create a text box and type into it, Inkscape will INEVITABLY freeze. Lock up. The software becomes unresponsive, although the operating system still works. I can minimize and maximize the Inkscape window, but cannot do anything with the program. Maxmimizing the window after minimizing it results in the Inkscape window being filled with solid blackness (the window is not re-drawing and the program is frozen).
The only way to stop Inkscape is to end the process.

- This freezing behaviour is entirely repeateable, reproducable, and happens 100% of the time after typing a few sentences into a text box.
- Sometimes I seem to get lucky and can type longer sentences before freezing. Sometimes it happens on the second or third text box I create, but it ALWAYS happens (reproduced dozens of times in testing).
- It happens BOTH when I simply click the text cursor into the drawing area and begin typing, AND when I "drag out" a text box area to type into.
- It does not normally happen until there is about a "sentence-worth" of text in the text box.
- It happens regardless of which font I use.
- The software never recovers from the freeze no matter how much time is allowed. The process must be killed to close the program.
- There is no hard drive activity while Inkscape is frozen (i.e. no indication that this is a font-caching issue).
- Lock-up/freezing occurs with both simple documents and complex documents (with a lot of objects/layers)
- Only typing into text boxes cause this freezing. Manipulating graphics, or already-created text (i.e. re-sizing a text box) works without problem.

Things I have tried:

- removing and re-installing Inkscape (even manually deleting the configuration file in .config directory).
- changing the filter quality to lowest quality in preferences
- Note: I am aware that there is a 48.5 version of Inkscape out there, but I have not tried it as it has not been placed within any of the Ubuntu/Lubuntu software repositories yet.

This is of course extremely frustrating and makes using Inkscape in Lubuntu 14.04 impossible. I am forced to boot back into Windows XP SP3 where I have the same version of Inkscape and it works without a problem.

I have searched the internet many times for anybody else experiencing this problem, but have not been able to find anything. I would really like to solve this and am willing to provide any information from my system which might help, but I will need assistance in order to know what info to provide.

I have not filed a bug report yet because I am hoping someone on this forum might be able to help me first.

Thanks.

Hello:

I can only point the obvious: Because you say that you are running Lubuntu and winXP, I guess it's because you have an old machine.

So, maybe is your machine.

Recently, a relative give me a quite old machine, an HP Pentium IV, If I'm not wrong. I Installed Ubuntu 14.10 there. I'll check if I can reproduce your problems there

-Try to run Inkscape in command line with GUI:
https://inkscape.org/doc/inkscape-man.html

- In iInkscape in the View Menu, there is a Messages Panel, you can see debug messages there.

- Try to install an older version of Inkscape, or newer, or compile one yourself (If you want to):
https://inkscape.org/en/download/

Right now, I don't have more ideas.

Good luck

Hello again:
Iḿ going to give details of my test:
Ubuntu 14.10
995,2 MiB
Intel® Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz × 2
Intel® 915G x86/MMX/SSE2
32 bits
77,6 GB
Inkscape 0.48.5 r10040 (installed from Ubuntu Software Center)

I've tried to make a text box with click and then dragging. Also, with just adding text directly over the cursor. I haven't had any problems. The default font text is "sans".

Is important that you conserve your Lubuntu system?
Can't you use another Linux Distro?
Which are the characteristics of your computer?

Thank you for your reply.

This is a circa 2008-2009 era machine: Pentium 4 single core (hyperthreading) running at 2.8GHz. 3GB RAM. 32-bits.
So is it necessary for me to run WInXP and Lubuntu? Yes, with these resources. However, with these OSes installed, the system runs extremely well and is quite resilient and fast.

Please note that when I boot into WinXP SP3 on this same sytem, the WinXP version of Inkscape runs just fine. So it is not a performance issue, there is something wrong with the way Inkscape is behaving on my Lubuntu system.

I wonder if there is any way to have a log file saved during Inkscape execution which will identify the exact process during which Inkscape freezes.

I have thought about installing an older version of Inkscape, but being relatively new to Linux, it seems difficult to do. The automated software repositories only offer version 48.4.
Ubuntu software centre on my machine does not offer me version 48.5 like you stated above. I wonder why not.

You should notice that I'm using Ubuntu 14.10. But I like the simplicity of the desktop in Lubuntu.

I haven't tested so much, but I will say that runs relatively good. I couldn't say fast, because I don' t know how to measure that. Maybe you know something about that, a benchmark program, or a special test?

This machine it's some kind of symilar to your machine.I have more gigahertz, but you have more ram. And the system says is 32 bits.

Edit: It seems that your proccesor was released on Q1 2002 and mine was in Q1 2004. ummmm

About a debug log:
Go to Menu > View > Message Panel >> activate the capture log option.

You can use Inkscape in command line too, just google it.

I ran Inkscape from the command line, but I'm not sure what that was meant to accomplish.
While in that session I created a text box and started to type text into it.

It froze again.

No messages appeard in the View/message window that you suggested I open.

I started another session and opened a text box and typed into it. This time I activated the Messages "capture log messages" option.

It froze one more time.

Now where do I find the messages log file?

It seems the freezing occurs when the text I type is "bigger" than the box I've dragged-out with the mouse pointer. I.e. there is a greater liklihood of freezing once the text fills the box and runs off the bottom of the text box.

Now where do I find the messages log file?

After doing a quick search in my Home directory, i have to say that I have no Idea

There is an option on commnad line for fatal warnings (sort of), according to this:
https://inkscape.org/doc/inkscape-man.html#options


To see more about debugging and the message panel see here:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php ... g_Inkscape

I believe that you should uninstall Lubuntu and Installing Ubuntu 10.10 on your machine. But I don't want to take any responsability if your machine explode, or takes life and plans to rule the world, or something like that.

I am also using lubuntu on a modern desktop machine, 8-core i7, 32GB RAM, etc and I have the same problem. I might have run in to it on my laptop running Debian with LXDE also, but I can't remember now for sure. Perhaps its a compatibility problem with some aspect of LXDE? I don't know if I would call this reproducible because you can type some unpredictable amount of text before the whole thing freezes. It doesn't always happen right away, but it does always eventually happen.

Anyway, I've taken to creating text boxes in Inkscape, then saving as an SVG, and modifying their text with VIM. This is super ineffecient. Now that I know it seems to be limited to LXDE I started using inkscape in a VM running Debian and Gnome which seems to work fine so far.

Any ideas on what might cause this would be awesome!

Thanks everyone.

You all have searched the bug tracker? Might find some helpful info there. https://launchpad.net/inkscape

Hi.

try starting Inkscape from the command line using the following command;

unset GTK_IM_MODULE && inkscape

The && characters are two ampersand's - they look strange on this forum.

RGDS
Ragnar

Holy crap, that worked. Not sure how I would have found it since the title is super esoteric and I'm not getting the same error output, but I do see that there's already a bug filed for this issue here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/406036
But it claims to have been fixed. What gives?

In any case, I just put this line in ~/.bashrc


Of course, this would also work if you don't have scim:


and now I'll always open inkscape from the command line until this bug is fixed.

Thanks for the tip!

Jonathan

Sorry, team, this is definitely reproducible. This is on a brand new Brix Pro i7-4770R running Ubuntu 14.10. I started by using Tibetan Machine Uni font but then tried Ubuntu font. It has loced up at least five times on me. The OS and Unity are functional but the app won't come back to focus. It just stays greyed-out.

I will try the 'unset' fix. I love Inkscape, even on a Doze box. It is truly great FOSS, and I hope you can track this down.

EDIT: More clues. This comes from my console window after launching the unset alias:

** (inkscape:4916): WARNING **: Ignoring font without family that will crash Pango

** (inkscape:4916): WARNING **: Cannot open autosave directory!

The good news is that it hasn't hung.

Hello, I am the original poster in this thread.

I recently acquired a different computer and did a totally fresh installation of Lubuntu 14.10 and Inkscape 48.x (the same versions as on the computer described at the top of this thread).

The text-box freezing problem re-occurs on this "new" second machine. At this point I am convinced it is a Lubuntu/LXDE/Inkscape bug, not any problem with either of my machines.

This new machine is a Dell OptiPlex GX620 with PentiumD processor running at 2.8GHz with 3GB RAM installed.

ragstian wrote:Hi.

try starting Inkscape from the command line using the following command;

unset GTK_IM_MODULE && inkscape

The && characters are two ampersand's - they look strange on this forum.

RGDS
Ragnar

Thanks Ragnar, I can confirm that on my system this seems to fix the problem as well. But just WHAT does this line actually do and why do you think it fixes the problem? I am really curious to know.

Since this seems to be a legitimate bug, can anyone tell me how to fill out a bug report? Are any of the developers reading these discussion forums?

A similar bug seems to have occured here in 2009:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/406036

It looks like someone else found it recently (and his discussion thread even links back to this thread):

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1385009

Thanks very much.

Hi.

I'am by no means an expert here1

The linux (unix) unset command deletes the environment variable.
The GTK_IM_MODULE does handle input of international characters.
(As a "translator" between keyboard and application?)

I reckon the unset command deletes the GTK_IM_MODULE variable link to inkscape text input.

You might find more info on this by reading the source code for the GTK_IM_MODULE.
More info here; GTK ORG

Good Luck
RGDS
Ragnar