Bug#841936: gnome-terminal: gnome terminal does not open, no error message

[Simon McVittie]

Control: notfound 841936 3.14.1-1+deb8u1
Control: submitter 841936 matt11235 at protonmail.ch
Control: retitle 841936 does not start: org.gnome.Terminal exited with status 8
Control: found 841936 3.22.0-3

On Mon, 24 Oct 2016 at 05:21:51 -0400, Matthew wrote:
> I have the same problem as the OP

You have the same *symptom* as the OP, but perhaps for different reasons
(the original bug report was from someone whose locale setup seems to
be broken, which I suspect might be contributing to the bug they're seeing,
but your locale setup seems to be functioning correctly).

Without more information from the original bug reporter, we can't say
whether you are getting that symptom for the same reasons, so I have
created a new bug number (841936) to represent your report - at least
we can know when yours is fixed. Please send all further correspondence
about this bug to 841936 at bugs.debian.org (no need to cc me, I receive
that bug's emails anyway).

You didn't mention which version of gnome-terminal is installed, so I've
assumed it's the same as gnome-terminal-data. If that's wrong, please
let me know.

> Error constructing proxy for org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0:
> Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.Terminal:
> GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ChildExited: Process
> org.gnome.Terminal exited with status 8

Thanks, that's a good start on working out what's happening here. Please
look in /var/log/syslog for messages mentioning dbus, systemd or
gnome-terminal around the time that you tried to launch gnome-terminal,
and send them to the new bug.

As a minimum, I would expect that you should see messages like this:

    Oct 24 00:00:00 yourbox dbus-daemon[1234]: Activating via systemd: service name='org.gnome.Terminal' unit='gnome-terminal-server.service'
    Oct 24 00:00:00 yourbox systemd[4321]: Starting GNOME Terminal Server...

followed by some messages that indicate that the activation failed.

The output of

     systemctl --user status gnome-terminal-server.service

would also be useful.

Regards,
    S