How to debug Nautilus crashes and issues?

Question

I have a problem since the last update: Nautilus mysteriously doesn't start properly. I see it is a systems wide problem, i.e. affecting all the users on my host. Nevertheless, I have tried:

1. clean ~/.gconf folder
2. clean ~/.config folder

But nothing seems to cure the issue.

As a temporary workaround I can:

killall nautilus
nautilus -q
nautilus

Then wait for a few tens of seconds, no error displayed, and nautilus starts.

In the process I get:

andy@Andy-HyperTop14$ nautilus -q
Initializing nautilus-image-converter extension
sys:1: Warning: Source ID 273 was not found when attempting to remove it
sys:1: Warning: Source ID 274 was not found when attempting to remove it
sys:1: Warning: Source ID 275 was not found when attempting to remove it

I don't understand this output.

This seems to be a common problem flagged in: How to restart nautilus without logging out?

Question 1 Where are the Nautilus related errors logged? I have looked in

/var/log

But nothing can be connected to Nautilus from there.

Question 2 Is there a way to run the tool in "debug mode"?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Here is a solution I found from the GNOME website. Simply set the environmental variables before launching nautilus, i.e.:

G_DEBUG="all" NAUTILUS_DEBUG="All" nautilus

Logs can be captured from the terminal output.