Hi,
while starting to work with gnucash portable I've run into one or more problems.
At first glance the app ran fine on my Windows XP Pro machine, but I soon noticed something puzzling.
Although I had NOT installed the language files the help texts where a mix of English headers and German text body. Leading me to assume that the app was using some system language setting (my desktop language being German).
After saving and switching to another machine the app started with the following error message:
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details - 2: IOR file 'I:\portable_applications\PortableApps\GnuCashPortable\Data\Profile\Temp\gconfd-jacob.froehlich/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd located: No such file or directory)
but it was not possible to load the save file.
Being unable to find the (again assumed) config file containing the path setting and fruitless creation of an ..lock\ior file, I gave up deleted the app directory and reinstalled.
Now gnucash starts with the error message:
gconfd-2.exe Fehler in Anwendung
Die Anweisung in "0x7c9211de" verweist auf Speicher in "0x6174726f". Der Vorgang "read" konnte nicht auf dem Speicher durchgeführt werden.
(routhly translated it says: operation points to memory address and the read operation failed)
It does this on both machines and after repeated attemps at reinstallation.
Can anyone shed some light on this for me?
I'm reduced to cursing whoever ported gconf to windows, because thats my best guess as to the source of my problems.
Regards,
Jacob
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In regards to the language issue, GnuCash uses the system language setting. When the new PAM is released that supports changing the language, it will use whatever you set using the PAM menu. In the meantime, if you want to change it, see this post: https://portableapps.com/node/12508. If you don't install the language files, GnuCash itself will default to English, but it looks like GConf must have its own German translations built-in.
As for the GConf issue, that's one I haven't seen before, and I'm at a loss as to how to duplicate it... My suggestion would be to back up your saved accounts file (by default in GnuCashPortable\Data\Profile, named whatever you chose when you saved), then delete the entire Data directory. It sounds to me like GConf has some invalid settings saved somehow. Deleting the Data directory should start things from scratch the next time you run GnuCash Portable.
formerly rayven01
Thanks for the pointer concerning the language. I will check that out on my NonPortable installation as soon as I get to my home machine.
I had another run at the GConf issue. This is what I did:
1. downloaded GnuCash Portable 2.2.5 Pre-Release 1 (MD5: 493c70cb259fddde275c29b78c684e2b)
2. stopped the PortableAppsMenu
3. deleted the entire GnuCashPortable directory
4. installed version 2.2.5 Pre-Release 1
5. started the PortableAppsMenu
6. started GnuCashPortable
7. got error '... read operation failed' as described in the original post for about 42 times
8. GnuCashPortable window and Error window come up
'An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for gnucash. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly.'
Pressing 'Details' on the Error window yields the reported 'Failed to contact configuration server...' error 5 times repeated.
9. GnuCashPortable shows the complete menu, the save button, but no content and none of the menu operations that I tried worked (unsurprisingly)
Since the whole app ran once on this machine, I'm thinking that GConf might not be quite 'portable' enough. The earlier installation might have left traces on this machine that now interfere with the startup of GConf. Could something like that be possible?
I'll run the same sequence on a computer I haven't used before later and report the findings.
Best Regards,
Jacob Froehlich
It's possible, but not very likely.. we've had several people check it with regshot and not discover anything left behind, which is usually very reliable.
The only other thing I can think of is it appears that your username is jacob.froehlich on that machine (from the path listed in the first post). It doesn't by any chance contain any non-ASCII characters does it (umlaut, etc)? I did test a username with a period in it and it worked fine, so it's not that.
That temp directory is deleted after each run, so it seems to me that it must be failing because for whatever reason it is creating the file with the wrong name and is then unable to read it. More than likely this is a bug with GConf.
formerly rayven01
Hi Schawn,
my actual name contains Umlauts, but the username on the machines I used to test gnuCash is ASCII characters only.
I tried the steps from my last post on a different computer (with the same user profile) and had the same errors. No joy.
Is there a way to generate some useful trace info for GConf?
If there is a bug there I'd like to be able to report it.
You can try turning on logging. Please see this post for instructions. From the detail you are getting already I doubt that is going to give you much more information but it's worth a shot.
Beyond that, since the problem is so narrow (apparently limited to your specific user profile) the GnuCash developers are probably not going to be quick to jump on this unless a) you can provide steps with which they can easily replicate the problem or b) you can provide them with a stack trace from a debugger (gdb). Unfortunately a gdb stack trace requires GnuCash being compiled with debug flags on, which is not the case for the pre-compiled binaries that we use, so it would require compiling from source yourself.
One more thing to try, if you have admin rights, is to install the non-portable GnuCash on a machine using the problem user profile and see if it gives the same results. I'm fairly certain it will, but if it doesn't then at least we know to dig deeper into the portable version.
formerly rayven01
You were right. Logging, following the instructions you linked to, didn't yield much. This is what I got:
* WARN [guid_init()] only got 533 bytes.
The identifiers might not be very random.
* WARN Could not spawn perl: Failed to execute child process (No such file or directory)
I installed GnuCashPortable-2.2.5 and played around some more.
Just to see if it made a difference I installed ActivePerl, but no joy, same error.
After that I tried your last suggestion and installed GnuCash locally. Against my own expectation as well, it did run. I could load my accounts and work normally.
It seems the problem I'm running into concerns only the portable version.
What do you suggest? Is this error worth further effort, or should I chalk it up to Murphy's law and content myself with the non-portable GnuCash?
Wow, I have to admit I am stumped. I fully expected it to be a general GnuCash bug. I've tried every which way from Sunday to reproduce the error with several different user accounts to no avail. I think under that user account you're going to have to use the non-portable version I'm afraid.
formerly rayven01