Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Inkscape crashes

[Sam Geeraerts]

Richard Stallman schreef:
> Inkscape crashes on startup.  I ran it with no args,
> and it displayed a small window for a short time
> so fast I could not see it.
>
> On the xterm it says something about "GC Warning: Out of Memory".
>
> The machine has swap space so I doubt no memory was available.

I tried Inkscape on my Yeeloong and it started without a problem.

I searched the Debian and Ubuntu bug trackers. There are lots of reports 
of Inkscape crashing, but I could find only one that seems similar to 
your case [1]. It was reported over 3 years ago (version 0.44) and was 
not acted upon.

As for diagnosing the problem: you could try the Debian way of getting a 
backtrace [2]. It comes down to rebuilding and installing the package 
and running it with gdb.

Alternatively, the output of 'strace inkscape' may provide some clue.

If this actually is a memory problem, then an analysis with Valgrind 
might prove useful [3], although I've found a few comments from users 
about Inkscape not working well with it. [3] also says that you can turn 
off the garbage collector (GC), but I'm not sure if that's recommended 
for normal use.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/167742
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/HowToGetABacktrace
[3] 
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/TestingFramework#Valgrind_Memory_Leak_Testing