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New install of Ubuntu 24.04 on a System76 Pangolin laptop. After 2 weeks of use the terminal won't open. I see in the App Center there is a terminal listed with a green install button showing. It is 0.9.9-3build3. Please help. I've been administer of laptops running Ubuntu and linux for 10 and 20 years respectively. No terminal is a serious problem from my perspective.

rawlins02
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  • See if switching language will fix it https://askubuntu.com/questions/1442350/terminal-not-launching-in-ubuntu-22-04 – amar Jun 21 '24 at 18:37
  • You are a power user but don't know that you should post the relevant journal parts here? :D Bruh – Balázs Börcsök Jun 21 '24 at 19:42
  • @amar, switching language did not fix it. – rawlins02 Jun 21 '24 at 19:54
  • What is the content of /etc/default/locale? – amar Jun 22 '24 at 06:19
  • And also see this https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2479980 – amar Jun 22 '24 at 06:23
  • What steps do you exactly perform? Are you sure you're trying to open "gnome-terminal", the one you tagged the question with? Its version number isn't anywhere near 0.9.9. – egmont Jun 22 '24 at 08:41
  • @amar /etc/default/locale has the line: LANG=en_US.UTF-8. After your previous suggestion I used the GUI for Settings -> Region & Language to attempt a change. The GUI shows under "Your Account": English (Canada). Under Formats it says United States. Under the section Login Screen it show langauge is English(United States). Should I change /etc/default/locales to: LANG=en_CA.UTF-8? I see there is a update-locale command. Maybe I can use the admin account to change /etc/default/locale for my user account? – rawlins02 Jun 22 '24 at 13:47
  • @egmont What I do is left click on the terminal icon in the dash. I do not know if that is "gnome-terminal". I did not mean to imply that I had been using or attempting to use gnome-terminal 0.9.9. What I was trying to say is that I see there is a gome-terminal in the App Center with a green "install" button showing, which leads me to believe that that tool is not currently installed. I hope this information makes things clearer. BTW, I see that terminal is still working fine in the admin account that I have access to on this computer. – rawlins02 Jun 22 '24 at 13:53
  • @rawlins02 Try unistalling and installing it – amar Jun 22 '24 at 14:09
  • @amar I just uninstalled gnome-terminal in Synaptic Package Manager. The terminal icon disappeared from the dash. Then installed. The icon reappeared in the dash. Yet the problem persists. A small icon shows spinning over the terminal icon for a minute, then vanishes. I'm thinking about bailing on v24.04 to install 20.04 that has worked great for years on a Lenovo laptop. Too bad. – rawlins02 Jun 22 '24 at 15:08
  • before you do that restart your computer and check it – amar Jun 22 '24 at 15:14
  • I've restarted. Left click still will not produce the terminal window. I've been using Terminator on my Lenovo laptop running 20.04. I've just installed it on System76 Pangoling running 24.04. Maybe this is a better option. Just hope it doesn't ever stop functioning. – rawlins02 Jun 22 '24 at 15:48

1 Answers1

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Uninstalling xdg-desktop-portal-gnome did it for me.

And I got this from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/1chpshs/comment/lqfvqdw/

I got on the trail to that post as I had similar experience as the thread there: after reboot or login, terminal would not open (spinning disk) for quite a while. But sometimes, after a few minutes, when trying again, it suddenly opened.

All other hints I saw across posts were dead-ends:

  • I have a stock .bashrc
  • it is a fresh install of Ubuntu 24.04.1 (no upgrade)
  • no funny things regarding python

So, yeah, after sudo apt-get remove xdg-desktop-portal-gnome and a reboot, all problems with terminal disappeared for me. I admit I have something of a bad feeling as I have no idea what exactly removing that package has as consequence for day-to-day operation, but so far it works and I am crossing fingers.

HTH.

BaCh
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