Ubuntu 18.04.2 Gnome Terminal will no longer launch

Question

When I attempt to start Gnome Terminal via the favorites bar, ctrl-alt-t, Activities → Terminal it does not start.

I have x-term installed and it runs fine.

From the x-term shell, I run gnome-shell --version and it reports: GNOME Shell 3.28.4

• What steps are recommended to troubleshoot to diagnosis what is wrong?
• Is there a way to safely reinstall the Gnome terminal so that it works?

Thanks to Byte Commander for the suggestion, I ran gnome-terminal from the x-term CLI and saw the following output:

$ gnome-terminal
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/gnome-terminal", line 9, in <module>
    from gi.repository import GLib, Gio
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gi/__init__.py", line 42, in <module>
    from . import _gi
ImportError: cannot import name '_gi' from 'gi' (/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gi/__init__.py)

Now I realize what happened that broke things. A few days ago I decided to build my own Python3. For whatever reason, it looks like I have a bad install or build of Python3.

Given the above output, what suggestions are there to fix it?

Answer 1

Thanks (so much) to Byte Commander for the clue to resolve the problem.

I found the following link: Solve the ubuntu16.04 terminal can not open - Programmer Sought

With a slight variation from the instructions to match the version numbers that I was working with (moving from Python 3.6 and going to Python 3.7) I simply ran the following:

sudo cp _gi_cairo.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so _gi_cairo.cpython-37m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so
sudo cp _gi.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so _gi.cpython-37m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so

Once I did this, I was able to run:

gnome-terminal