GNOME developers, users, et alia:
I got this screen “Oh no! Something has gone wrong” please log out. I was running the notepad and GNOME terminal. No browser at all.
Can anyone give me some help on how I troubleshoot what caused the issue? It has happened several times since yesterday, same circumstances and programs running.
Stuart
Are there any reports about something crashing in the journal from around that time? journalctl --since yesterday
Sebastian,
Is there a way I can send it to you via email? It is quite large and also, perhaps the entirety of it is not relatvent to the GNOME forum here (not due to privacy, but just errors for non GNOME related things). If I emailed it to you, then maybe you could tell me what parts to post and we can try to publicize whatever the problem is so people can help remediate or know about it.
Stuart
If you’re not concerned about privacy, feel free to post a link to the log here. Don’t worry about non-GNOME errors, we can ignore them 
Also, any reason you’re not on Wayland?
Adrianvovk, et alia:
I am curious to try to solve any of the issues shown in this journal, but surely the ones that are related to GNOME not functioning properly.
I am a bit confused by your remark about Wayland. I always understood GNOME to a desktop environment and Wayland to be a display server. What made you think I am not running it? How did you know that? I do not even know which display server I am running. I run Kali Linux GNOME, so whatever it comes with I have. I never paid much attention to that.
Stuart
I always understood GNOME to a desktop environment and Wayland to be a display server
X11 and Wayland are protocols. XOrg is an implementation of the X11 protocol and we call that a “display server”. It’s the most common implementation but there are others
In Wayland there isn’t just one display server, each desktop environment has its own. GNOME is its own display server on Wayland
What made you think I am not running it? How did you know that?
Because that white screen only exists on X11 and not on Wayland
I do not even know which display server I am running
The logs confirm you’re running GNOME on X11
journal.log
Here’s the relevant parts of the log:
May 16 11:16:24 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[2899]: meta_window_stick: assertion '!window->override_redirect' failed
May 16 11:26:56 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[2899]: JS ERROR: out of memory
May 16 11:26:56 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[2899]: JS ERROR: out of memory
May 16 11:26:56 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[2899]: JS ERROR: out of memory
May 16 11:26:56 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[2899]: JS ERROR: out of memory
May 16 11:26:56 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[2899]: JS ERROR: out of memory
May 16 11:26:56 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[2899]: JS ERROR: out of memory
May 16 11:26:56 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[2899]: JS ERROR: out of memory
May 16 11:26:57 gd8200-ethernet kernel: gnome-shell[2899]: segfault at 0 ip 00007ffb3525ac50 sp 00007fffa8e27a70 error 6 in libmozjs-128.so.128.10.0[a5ac50,7ffb34947000+d24000] likely on CPU 0 (core 0, socket 0)
May 16 11:26:57 gd8200-ethernet kernel: Code: 41 b8 ff ff ff ff 4c 89 ef e8 fc e4 6e ff 5a 59 49 39 c5 0f 84 4e ff ff ff 48 8b 05 8a 0b 84 01 48 8d 1d 07 9c 42 00 48 89 18 <c7> 04 25 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0f 0b 0f 1f 00 48 8b 05 69 0b 84
May 16 11:26:57 gd8200-ethernet systemd[2540]: org.gnome.Shell@x11.service: Main process exited, code=killed, status=11/SEGV
May 16 11:26:57 gd8200-ethernet systemd[2540]: org.gnome.Shell@x11.service: Failed with result 'signal'.
May 16 11:26:57 gd8200-ethernet systemd[2540]: org.gnome.Shell@x11.service: Consumed 2h 24min 27.709s CPU time, 1.1G memory peak.
May 16 11:26:57 gd8200-ethernet systemd[2540]: org.gnome.Shell@x11.service: Triggering OnFailure= dependencies.
May 16 11:26:57 gd8200-ethernet systemd[2540]: org.gnome.Shell@x11.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 1.
May 16 11:26:57 gd8200-ethernet systemd[2540]: Started gnome-session-failed.service - GNOME Session Failed lockdown screen (user).
May 16 11:26:57 gd8200-ethernet systemd[2540]: Reached target gnome-session-failed.target - GNOME Session Failed.
Two things stand out:
adrianvovk,
Thank you for your thorough analysis and explanations.
I am not running Kali Linux in a VM, I am running bare metal on my laptop (a GD8200). Moreover, the laptop has an i7 processor with 16GB of RAM. In fact, this kind of crash has occurred when I have had GNOME Terminal open (with 5 terminal tabs, all doing nothing) and Chromium open with a tab, where no website was typed in yet or maybe I was on a commercial news website reading headlines).
I would imagine you feel that if I were to convert my system from using X11 to Wayland, it might well not have these issues? I am aware that Wayland is the way ahead for display servers vice the aged X11 packages. There is no reason in my view to not switch to Wayland.
I found and read this a few minutes ago, so I am going to try to bring up GNOME using Wayland. If this resolves my issues, then so be it!
Stuart
adrianvovk,
Since switching to Wayland keyboard de-bounce is unbearable. I’d prefer the system crashing to this. Wayland must have some major bug in it, it seem as if it is terrible junk. It took me 25 minutes to write these 3 sentences due to constant repeating keys. Press an “e” get 20 of them. Press a backspace, get 30 of them. Perhaps this is why the good folks at Kali still have Kali running on X11, because they knew it has some rotten bugs in it. I tried to use setup to change the keyboard delay, but I could never fix it. I finally gave up and went back to X11. I prefer the crashing to an unusable keyboard.
journalctl --grep=gnome --no-pager --catalog
May 18 15:34:53 gd8200-ethernet dbus-daemon[2582]: [session uid=1000 pid=2582 pidfd=6] Activating service name=‘org.freedesktop.FileManager1’ requested by ‘:1.41’ (uid=1000 pid=3034 comm=“/usr/bin/gnome-shell”)
May 18 15:34:53 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: loading user theme: /usr/share/themes/Kali-Dark/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css
May 18 15:34:55 gd8200-ethernet NetworkManager[1579]: [1747607695.6687] agent-manager: agent[6b709da3ba90c978,:1.104/org.gnome.Shell.NetworkAgent/1000]: agent registered
May 18 15:34:56 gd8200-ethernet dbus-daemon[2582]: [session uid=1000 pid=2582 pidfd=6] Activating service name=‘org.gnome.NautilusPreviewer’ requested by ‘:1.246’ (uid=1000 pid=64789 comm=“/usr/bin/nautilus --gapplication-service”)
May 18 15:34:56 gd8200-ethernet dbus-daemon[2582]: [session uid=1000 pid=2582 pidfd=6] Activating service name=‘org.gnome.ArchiveManager1’ requested by ‘:1.247’ (uid=1000 pid=64809 comm=“gjs /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ding@rasters”)
May 18 15:34:58 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: 0 DesktopManager() [“/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ding@rastersoft.com/app/desktopManager.js”:265:13]
May 18 15:34:58 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: 1 anonymous() [“/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ding@rastersoft.com/app/ding.js”:180:26]
May 18 15:34:58 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: 2 anonymous() [“/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ding@rastersoft.com/app/ding.js”:197:21]
May 18 15:34:58 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: 3 [“/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ding@rastersoft.com/app/ding.js”:206:13]
May 18 15:34:58 gd8200-ethernet dbus-daemon[2582]: [session uid=1000 pid=2582 pidfd=6] Successfully activated service ‘org.gnome.ArchiveManager1’
May 18 15:34:58 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: DBus interface for File-roller (org.gnome.ArchiveManager1) is now available.
May 18 15:34:58 gd8200-ethernet dbus-daemon[2582]: [session uid=1000 pid=2582 pidfd=6] Successfully activated service ‘org.gnome.NautilusPreviewer’
May 18 15:34:58 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: DBus interface for Nautilus (org.gnome.Nautilus.FileOperations2) is now available.
May 18 15:34:58 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: GNOME nautilus 48.1
May 18 15:34:58 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: DBus interface for Nautilus-Sushi (org.gnome.NautilusPreviewer) is now available.
May 18 15:48:21 gd8200-ethernet systemd[2555]: Started app-gnome-chromium-69438.scope - Application launched by gnome-shell.
░░ Subject: A start job for unit UNIT has finished successfully
░░ Defined-By: systemd
░░ Support: Debian -- User Support
░░
░░ A start job for unit UNIT has finished successfully.
░░
░░ The job identifier is 1000.
May 18 18:00:34 gd8200-ethernet dbus-daemon[2582]: [session uid=1000 pid=2582 pidfd=6] Activating service name=‘org.freedesktop.FileManager1’ requested by ‘:1.41’ (uid=1000 pid=3034 comm=“/usr/bin/gnome-shell”)
May 18 18:00:34 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: loading user theme: /usr/share/themes/Kali-Dark/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css
May 18 18:00:36 gd8200-ethernet NetworkManager[1579]: [1747616436.8424] agent-manager: agent[29fc8fd149ebb99d,:1.104/org.gnome.Shell.NetworkAgent/1000]: agent registered
May 18 18:00:37 gd8200-ethernet dbus-daemon[2582]: [session uid=1000 pid=2582 pidfd=6] Activating service name=‘org.gnome.NautilusPreviewer’ requested by ‘:1.269’ (uid=1000 pid=91948 comm=“/usr/bin/nautilus --gapplication-service”)
May 18 18:00:37 gd8200-ethernet dbus-daemon[2582]: [session uid=1000 pid=2582 pidfd=6] Activating service name=‘org.gnome.ArchiveManager1’ requested by ‘:1.270’ (uid=1000 pid=91970 comm=“gjs /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ding@rasters”)
May 18 18:00:39 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: 0 DesktopManager() [“/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ding@rastersoft.com/app/desktopManager.js”:265:13]
May 18 18:00:39 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: 1 anonymous() [“/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ding@rastersoft.com/app/ding.js”:180:26]
May 18 18:00:39 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: 2 anonymous() [“/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ding@rastersoft.com/app/ding.js”:197:21]
May 18 18:00:39 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: 3 [“/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ding@rastersoft.com/app/ding.js”:206:13]
May 18 18:00:39 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: GNOME nautilus 48.1
May 18 18:00:39 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: DBus interface for Nautilus (org.gnome.Nautilus.FileOperations2) is now available.
May 18 18:00:39 gd8200-ethernet dbus-daemon[2582]: [session uid=1000 pid=2582 pidfd=6] Successfully activated service ‘org.gnome.ArchiveManager1’
May 18 18:00:39 gd8200-ethernet dbus-daemon[2582]: [session uid=1000 pid=2582 pidfd=6] Successfully activated service ‘org.gnome.NautilusPreviewer’
May 18 18:00:39 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: DBus interface for File-roller (org.gnome.ArchiveManager1) is now available.
May 18 18:00:39 gd8200-ethernet gnome-shell[3034]: DING: DBus interface for Nautilus-Sushi (org.gnome.NautilusPreviewer) is now available.
Stuart
PS - I appreciate all your assistance and am by no means upset with you, I just need to figure out how to fix X11 since Wayland is absolutely abhorrent to use given I have zero ability to type any text with it. It is not hardware, as once I switched back to X11 my keboard worked perfectly again.
Something seems very wrong with your system, or your installation of Kali. What you’re describing is not normal.
This kind of behavior (where a key gets “stuck” and repeats) can happen when your whole system freezes up (including the kernel) and simply is too busy to ask the keyboard whether or not the button was released. Theoretically it can happen on X just as much as it does on Wayland, so I’m not sure why you’re only experiencing it with one and not the other… Does the display freeze/stutter while the keyboard input freezes then repeats?
I’ve only ever experienced this behavior when the system is close to an OOM condition and the kernel has to repeatedly step in, freeze the whole OS, then perform emergency OOM killing to preserve itself. This is also pretty neatly consistent with the JS ERROR: out of memory errors you have in your log. Have you tried monitoring the system’s memory usage to confirm that there isn’t something running (in the background potentially) and consuming loads of memory?
Finally, your logs there are also quite strange. It appears that your system is using dbus-daemon’s native service activation, but that shouldn’t be happening with systemd… That might be a pretty major misconfiguration (maybe Kali’s fault?). Couldn’t tell ya, but it’s definitely weird. I don’t think it’s a valid configuration. Though I wouldn’t immediately blame it for the bugs you’re experiencing. Still: looks like your installation might be damaged in some way
Adrianvovk,
I agree it is absolutely not normal to see the behaviors I am experiencing with X11 and Wayland. I did try to look to see if any such issues were reported for X11 or Wayland as I have been having and did not see any. So, perhaps I was a bit quick and underwhelmingly thoughtful about outright blaming Wayland directly. It may well be that Kali has just not tuned itself (with libraries and such) to really run Wayland well and maybe that is why X11 persists as the default display server therein for now.
I am beginning to agree, It may be time for me to simply perform a fresh installation of Kali Linux from scratch. That said, I am far more generally predisposed to conducting diagnostic activities that prove categorically what is wrong (in any technical problem area), but I am beginning to realize that it might be a very long and arduous process that can be avoided relative to the instant case. That said, as I was drafting this epistle, it dawned upon me that there is something I can try that could potentially prove or disprove your assertion. I can place the Kali “live” ISO onto a flash drive and boot it in Live mode. If the system is then stable thereafter, I would take that as evidence that it is time for a fresh installation of Kali Linux.
Indeed, whilst I have not had the GD8200 laptop since 2013, I have been using Kali Linux on a daily basis since then (and Linux since its release in 1991) and this is the first time I have encountered such persistent instability with Kali Linux, or any Linux distribution on this level. I truly have never seen in the past any kind of invasive issue instantiating such dysfunction as I have taken notice of that causes my system to be unstable or unusable currently.
I honestly doubt I am facing an OOM condition (with X11), when I have 5 GNOME Terminals open (none running anything other than just commands from time to time) and a browser with one tab open to a US national news site (Foxnews or Newsmax). If there is an OOM condition, I would presume it was due to X11 not my application mix. Moreover, when I switched back from Wayland to X11 the keyboard issues evaporated entirely, so that was directly related to the Wayland switch for sure.
I have a replacement 5TB USB drive coming back to me soon from warranty exchange. Once it does I will backup my entire Kali Installation and perform a fresh install from scratch. The internal drive I have in my GD8200 that Kali is installed upon is a 1TB drive, so a full backup will be easily accomplished on the 5TB external USB drive.
My next test is going to be running Kali Live version 2025.2 from a flash drive.
Thanks for all your thoughts and assistance.
Stuart
Adrianvovk,
Something interesting seems to have happened. It appears that since switching to Wayland and then switching back to X11, the lockups/freezes have stopped occurring. I would imagine that neither such activity should have changed any configuration files in any substantive manner, but, the system has not locked-up or frozen now in 1 day. I need to reboot it due to some updates, but am holding off to see how many days it stays running and does not lookup/freeze up. I am leaving the web browser open and the GNOME Terminal just as I had been doing before when it frequently locked up/froze up in the past. I am still taking notice of many of the other errors I was seeing before, though I do plan to reinstall Kali Linux in the near future (once my replacement external drive arrives).
Thanks again for all your thoughts on this matter. Be it known, I remain as baffled that the system no longer hangs as I was that it was hanging in the first place!
Stuart
All,
The issue seems to have returned and it did not (as is reasonable to think) “just go away”. Thus far, I took some advice from a friend to assure that I fully extirpated the XFCE remnants that were the original display server and window manager installed before trying to move to GNOME some time back. I also made sure to install the kali-desktop-gnome and gnome metapackages to assure nothing was missing or jacked up.
I just rebooted my system after having done so and will be seeing what the stability is like for now. I mentioned to one friend that I was having difficulty finding help in figuring out what was wrong with GNOME and was advise to reinstall the system. He responded with, don’t they know this is Linux and not Windows? Linux folks don’t do that! I said, yes, I know.
If anyone else has any further suggestions I am interested to try them.
Stuart
Linux folks do that all the time. Some people have weird fetishes about what Linux users should or should not do, and they are all rooted in contrarian positions that make zero technical sense. If your installation is so completely hosed because you installed a bunch of conflicting environments, the only sane thing to do is to turn it back into a pristine, well-known state, and that is a reinstallation.
Emmanuele,
That is all fine and dandy but not a single thing has been done to test or diagnose if that is the case, so I hardly see why such an invasive solution should be considered.
That said, I have begun to use this in my journal
gnome-shell[4738]: Error updating VPN IP: ipOutput.match(…) is null
I had two VPN profiles and deleted them both, but still I see these errors.
Stuart
That does not seem to be an error from GNOME Shell code:
carlos@anacleto:~/Source/gnome-shell$ git log -p -S ipOutput |wc -l
0
Most likely an extension, or something else launched through GNOME Shell, but sharing stdout.
Carlos, et alia:
Thank you to everyone for your ideas and comments. Indeed I really do want to clean up my GNOME environment on this Linux based laptop so it functions properly. Even if I were to entirely reinstall Linux I still need to understand why things are happening so they do not occur again the future.
Indeed there was a “VPN IP” extension that was enabled and as such I disabled it which then stopped the errors from getting thrown. I am not often connecting to a VPN currently (as the laptop generally sits on my LAN), thus it is superfluous for me to have it enabled at this juncture.
That said, I did run journalctl with the --follow option and noticed a couple of other errors I just started to research. Any thoughts on these?
Jun 20 07:02:47 hostname-redacted chromium.desktop[4808]: [4808:4813:0620/070247.894880:ERROR:net/socket/ssl_client_socket_impl.cc:878] handshake failed; returned -1, SSL error code 1, net_error -202
Jun 20 07:02:57 hostname-redacted chromium.desktop[4808]: [4808:4813:0620/070257.145618:ERROR:net/socket/ssl_client_socket_impl.cc:878] handshake failed; returned -1, SSL error code 1, net_error -202
Jun 20 07:03:08 hostname-redacted /usr/libexec/gdm-x-session[2772]: (II) Axis 0x1 value 736 is outside expected range [1230, 5139]
Jun 20 07:03:08 hostname-redacted /usr/libexec/gdm-x-session[2772]: See https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.28.1/absolute_coordinate_ranges.html for details
Jun 20 07:03:31 hostname-redacted chromium.desktop[4808]: [4808:4813:0620/070331.650139:ERROR:net/socket/ssl_client_socket_impl.cc:878] handshake failed; returned -1, SSL error code 1, net_error -202
I am guessing this is because I have a page open in the browser with an invalid certificate?
Jun 20 07:11:08 hostname-redacted systemd[2605]: Started app-gnome-org.gnome.Settings-46918.scope - Application launched by gnome-shell.
Jun 20 07:11:09 hostname-redacted dbus-daemon[1509]: [system] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.ModemManager1' unit='dbus-org.freedesktop.ModemManager1.service' requested by ':1.224' (uid=1000 pid=46918 comm="/usr/bin/gnome-control-center")
Jun 20 07:11:09 hostname-redacted dbus-daemon[1509]: [system] Activation via systemd failed for unit 'dbus-org.freedesktop.ModemManager1.service': Unit dbus-org.freedesktop.ModemManager1.service not found.
Jun 20 07:11:09 hostname-redacted gnome-control-c[46918]: Error connecting to ModemManager: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.ModemManager1: Unit dbus-org.freedesktop.ModemManager1.service not found.
Regarding the second error I see frequently it is perhaps related to the fact that I recently executed:
sudo systemctl disable --now ModemManager.service
in order to prevent the system from constantly throwing errors that the modem was not functioning. Well, the WWAN is not configured and turned on with a mobile phone provider (it’s 3G) so that is correct, but the constant pop-ups on the screen were highly annoying. Thus, the service was disabled. Is there something else I must do to inform GNOME, hay stop trying to muck with ModemManager?
My system does still freeze from time to time and require a power cycle to reboot (, but perhaps over time I will quash enough issues that it will stop. I am hoping that the VPN IP issue will stop the freeze ups, but we will see over time.
Stuart
Carlos, et alia:
Upon searching through the output of dmesg I took notice of the fact that my ethernet port link was going up and down many times.
My laptop has a built-in ethernet port which uses an Intel 82579LM. I checked and noticed that the proper driver was indeed being loaded (e1000e). However, I did find the following stack exchange article which might be able to solve my problem.
One other issue that I never posted about here was that I would SSH into one of my other virtual servers and get disconnected after only a couple of minutes of lacking any activity. I initially thought this was either due to the BASH TMOUT variable not being set to zero or a lack of SSH keep alive packets being sent.
Now I realize that if indeed the ethernet port link was going up and down, this would cause that to happen. Network issues can also cause GNOME to lock up.
I plan to attempt remediating this issue using some of the solutions provided within the stack exchange article as follows here upon.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/568252/linux-mint-intel-82579lm-nic-and-hardware-unit-hang
About every 24 to 36 hours, my laptop has been hanging. Only a hard reboot resolves that. If the above entitled solution actually fixes the problem, I will know that because my laptop will stay up for several days without locking up.
I will report back more as I learn more.
Stuart
Carlos, et alia:
It seems that upon installing Kali Linux (the latest ISO 2025.2 release) onto a USB stick, booting up and testing it (with zero changes to my hardware) I am not seeing the system lock up problem anymore (granted, default Kali uses XFCE not Gnome). I am now convinced that something within my OS environment is defective (not my specific user, as I had tried creating a new “blank user” and still saw the lock ups).
Indeed, never since I started working with Linux way back in 1991 have I seen such a scenario (personally or professionally) wherein an entire Linux installation needed to be reinstalled to resolve a technical issue that I could diagnose or isolate. Yet, that is what has occurred! Now, with no derisive intent towards Kali Linux, I usually use production (stable) versions of Linux for all my work. Kali Linux is the one exception as it is based on Debian Testing in it’s “stable version”.
At this juncture I have resolved to wait until the release of Debian Trixie, which will in turn impel a new release of Debian Testing (upon which Kali Linux is based). If after upgrading Kali Linux at that point the issue remains persistent, I will back everything up and reinstall the entire system as was recommended earlier on.
Once I know more, I will report back my next steps. Hopefully this colloquy will be of use to someone in the future.
Thanks to everyone for their comments.
Stuart