Technology, Ubuntu

Weird Bug Fix for Crashing Owncloud Client on Ubuntu 14.04:Segmentation Fault (core dumped)

Not that most of you are going to ever see this or care, but as for me, I just spent about 6 hours over the last few weeks trying to resolve it so I hope as a public service this will help someone both fix their client and save some time!

Background:

My Ubuntu owncloud client was working just fine on my netbook.  Then I made a change to the server where the URL changed where owncloud was hosted.  On one machine, I simply booted up owncloud, changed the setting and everything worked.  On the other machine, it would not forget the former URL and something went wacky inside.  I hope you like my terminology.  Anyways, I took the time and courage to just start trying to delete everything from my netbook related to owncloud and reinstall but that didn’t work either.  Finally, this is what worked (assuming you have opened a terminal window):

1. sudo apt-get purge owncloud-client

2. sudo apt-get autoremove owncloud-client

3. go to your home folder and totally delete the owncloud folder (make sure you save anything that might be in it and not synced to your server!)

4. KEY STEP

a) cd /tmp

b) ls

You should now see at least one directory that starts with sni-qt_owncloud_3658-HTGzH (or something along those lines).  In my case, I had many of them which I thought to be a problem.  So, I deleted them all and this was the step that fixed everything.  How to delete?

c) rm -rvf sni-qt ….

d) repeat steps  ‘b’ and ‘c’ above until all traces of these sni-qt directories are *totally gone*

5. Reinstall owncloud-client

sudo apt-get install owncloud-client

NOTE: It’s probably better, although I didn’t try, to instead open your software centre and install it from here.  I found my icon didn’t show up using the command line here in the terminal…. sup to you….

6. start owncloud by just typing ‘owncloud’ or by searching for it the normal way you open programs.

7. go into your ‘settings’ and make sure your server settings are correct.

Everything should now be working

Hope that helped and if you have time and energy please file this blog with the owncloud open source team.  I ran out of time….

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7 thoughts on “Weird Bug Fix for Crashing Owncloud Client on Ubuntu 14.04:Segmentation Fault (core dumped)

  1. Recommend that the command line only be used as an absolute last resort. Ubuntu Software Centre takes care of removing all the right bits and installing all the right bits, so that should be the first method.

  2. Thanks, I’ll try to see if this helps me. Software center does nothing more than apt-get, it uses apt in the background. But for people not used to the command line it’s a good tool.

  3. In my situation, the problem appears for 2 cases :

    1) A version mismatch between owncloud-client and owncloud server. In this case, it is necessary to align the two.

    2) A reinstallation or owncloud client update : the old configuration files is remained and impact the latest version installed.

    In that case :
    – Uninstall owncloud-client via synaptic: owncloud-client, client-l10n owncloud and libowncloudsync0
    – Delete temporary files and directories whose names begin with sni-qt *, in /tmp
    – Erase the $/.local/share/data/ownCloud (it contains the connection and configuration data from the previous version).
    – Reinstall owncloud-client

    1. using ubuntu 14.04 64bit and this didn’t help. I just installed owncloud, so never used it before, didn’t have any old configs, and the error is this segmentation fault (core dummped) after i try to put the url for my blaucloud.de account.

      1. Hi there. I’m not ultra-experienced in the back end stuff but I’m on 32 bit on this old machine that I blogged above. Not sure if that matters. Also I wonder if maybe you installed the wrong package (ie. installed 32 bit accidentally)? If you found a solution, feel free to post it here, too, to help someone. As an update, I have never had this problem since so the good news is that once it’s solved it seems to be solved well…

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