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I use Ubuntu GNOME 15.04 with gnome 3.16, and I got the following error message in a small popup.

"Warning! System error detected. Would you like to report it?"

While everything was fine and dandy, no problem whatsoever. It's a relatively fresh install with nothing out of the ordinary installed.(essentially gparted, mscorefonts, atom and a few gnome extensions) I reflexively clicked it away so I'm not absolutely sure the wording is 100% exact, but I'm fairly certain. Nautilus, atom and Terminal (with no commands entered yet) were open again, and all functioned correctly.

2 Answers 2

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I wouldn't call it malware, it's just apport.

If you just want to get rid of the message and you feel comfortable leaving apport enabled, you can run the following command (remember, apport can sometimes send sensitive info so leaving it enabled is an issue of privacy but it does help the developers take care of bugs and performance issues):

sudo rm /var/crash/* 

Alternatively, you can disable apport by running the following command:

sudo sed -i 's/=1/=0/g' /etc/default/apport; cat /etc/default/apport

The readout should display:

enabled=0

on the last line.

Next, you should probably also disable the apport.service from starting automatically by running the following command:

sudo systemctl disable apport.service

You can safely ignore the subsequent warnings.

Finally, to stop the apport service:

systemctl stop apport.service
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  • Thanks for the answer, I read after the thing, shouldn't it be disabled by default? Also, how can I get a more specific description of the error that triggered it? So far it's a good candidate for least helpful error message ever. Jul 23, 2015 at 0:38
  • @jetpackneedsrepair Hopefully you didn't delete them yet, run cat /var/crash/* to read the crash logs or you can find the individual files in the /var/crash/ directory using your file manager. Also, I believe apport is only disabled on LTS or "stable" versions of ubuntu like 14.04lts. You are using 15.04 which is more of a short term development release. These releases include stuff that might not always work quite right yet so apport is more of an important factor by contributing data back to developers whenever something doesn't work the way that it should.
    – mchid
    Jul 23, 2015 at 0:48
  • Oh, I thought stable meant it's not a dev/nightly/beta release.I think it's best to turn it off for now and report bugs manually if I find something serious. Jul 23, 2015 at 0:57
  • @Jetpackneedsrepair I agree, you can easily sanitize the data manually
    – mchid
    Jul 23, 2015 at 17:30
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That is a normal message. I recommend clicking "OK".

While the message is open, you could xlsclients -al to list the clients of your X server (man xlsclients, of course). See also man xwininfo,man xprop and (shudder) man 7 X to track down which process has that popup open.

Seriously, relax. Just the apport crash reporting system. man -k apport and dpkg -L apport should lead to some interesting reading.

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