Zenity throwing gdk_atom_intern errors

User Support General
1

A few weeks ago I started seeing two gdk_atom_intern: assertion ‘atom_name != NULL’ failed messages any time I ran a zenity window from the command line. All else seems fine…the zenity window itself displays, so IMHO this might as well be a specious error message.

I wasn’t too concerned about it except I now have a script that is failing partway through because zenity is throwing error 255 just from displaying a popup. The specious error is now causing some of my infrastructure to fail. I was forced to go in and suppress error checking on that step, which means real errors will not be caught.

I doubt it’s anything wrong with my scripting; I get it just from running zenity --info --text="test text" on the command line.

The timing indicates it COULD have something to do with my switchover to debian-12-minimal. Perhaps I’m missing a newly-required library or something like that.

Any ideas? (And yes I apologize in advance if it’s not qubes-specific…but I can’t find anything with duckduckgo.)

2

I have a little more on this.

Apparently ANY Gtk app throws this error when run in a domU. It’s not a minimal template thing,. it happens in a DomU based on Fedora-37-xfce. The problem doesn’t seem to exist in dom0.

I know from personal programming experience that all you have to do is call the gtk init and this error will show up. It has nothing to do with mishandling widgets; it happens before any widgets are created.

A duckduckgo search finds one guy complaining in a debian forum about how he’s trying to use GTK on qubes and getting this error, they refer him to here and to kali.

So this looks like it might be qubes specific.

3

Bumping into this same issue trying to launch gnome-terminal after installing it in a debian-12-minimal template.

In my case the terminal will hang and fail to launch. Xterm works fine.

4

It’s not.

export GDK_CORE_DEVICE_EVENTS=1

5

I infer you want me to put that line in etc/bash.bashrc.

It does seem to work, the question is how to ensure it always executes.

6

You could look at /etc/environment or /etc/profile.d

7

It ended up in etc/bash.bashrc, before I read your response. No compelling reason to move it to either a) a new file (named what?) in a directory full of odds and ends or b) an empty file. Startup is complicated enough as it is.

8

Seems specific to Debian 12. Debian 11 and Fedora 38/39 (both full and minimal templates) don’t throw the Zenity error.

9

I also faced this issue.

Did not work for me. At least to fix the gdk_atom issue with the SimpleX AppImage.

My solution (in the TemplateVM):

mkdir /etc/environment.d && nano /etc/environment.d/gdk.conf

and drop this in:

# sets the environment variable automatically even without X running.
{
  environment.variables = {
    GDK_CORE_DEVICE_EVENTS = "1";
  };
}

Shutdown TemplateVM and reboot AppVM.

Could you please check and verify if this also solves the issue on your side?