NoMachine in KDE system tray icon context menu broken

[MadMartian]

I am running NoMachine on Linux in KDE and the context menu from the system tray icon does not work properly.  It quickly flashes and then disappears again.  My spidy senses tell me it’s a focus stealing issue but I have turned it off and it still doesn’t work.  I don’t have this same problem with any other icons.  There is one other app that sits in the system tray that is completely unresponsive but other than that the rest of my applications’ system tray icons are responsive.

What makes this issue unique to NoMachine is that the context menu clearly attempts to raise and then is immediately dismissed again.  I think I managed to get it to stay properly once by clicking like mad on the icon, hardly a suitable work-around let alone solution.

There’s also a descriptive KDE pop-up window that appears when hovering over system tray icons, that might be interfering with it but I don’t really know.

Kubuntu: 16.04
KDE Plasma: 5.8.9
KDE Frameworks: 5.36.0
Qt: 5.6.1
Kernel: 4.15.0-96-generic
OS: 64-bit
Compositor: XRender

[kroy]

We cannot reproduce such problem on the same environment. Did you check client monitor logs (M-* or F-M-* folders on $HOME/.nx/ directory)?

[MadMartian]

None of those files have even been modified in the past 4 days.

This is some sort of GUI rendering glitch, it’s just the sort of thing that (as a programmer myself) would struggle to detect such behavior let alone log it.

[MadMartian]

Never mind, I skipped-over reading the “M-*”.  The log indicates an issue but doesn’t seem to log anything new when interacting with the system tray icon:

Info: Slave server running with pid 28947.
Info: Listening to slave connections on port 25002.
Info: Starting NoMachine Monitor version ‘6.9.2’.
Info: Loaded translation files for ‘English’.
28922 28922 12:49:49 091.975 OsDetect: Setting os type to ‘Ubuntu’.
28922 28922 12:49:49 092.019 Main: Creating a new connection monitor.
28989 28989 12:49:49 183 nxexecPAMOpen: ERROR! PAM library not found.
28989 28989 12:49:49 183 nxexecPAMOpen: ERROR! Error: ‘libpam.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory’.
28922 28922 12:49:49 343.726 ClientThread: Creating new thread.
[04.16.20 12:49:49.428] X Error: 143 143
Extension:    139 (RENDER)
Minor opcode: 7 ()
Resource id:  0x40003d3
[04.16.20 12:49:49.428] X Error: BadWindow 3
Major opcode: 18 ()
Resource id:  0x40003d2
[04.16.20 12:49:49.428] X Error: BadWindow 3
Major opcode: 4 ()
Resource id:  0x40003d2
28922 28922 12:49:49 864.130 MonitorService: Enabled drag and drop feature.
29728 29728 12:49:54 177 nxexecPAMOpen: ERROR! PAM library not found.
29728 29728 12:49:54 177 nxexecPAMOpen: ERROR! Error: ‘libpam.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory’.
nx/nx,cookie=<redacted>,x11=0,slave=1,type=physical-desktop,id=<redacted>:13002

[MadMartian]

I was able to inspect the environment of the nxclient.bin process (/usr/NX/bin/nxclient.bin –monitor –pid 12923) via /proc/28922/environ and came-up with this:

SHELL=/bin/bash
NX_VERSION=6.9.2
NX_LOGS=/home/<redacted@0>/.nx/<redacted@1>
NX_FEATURES=Hoth,ASUSAllSeries,Linux,Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS,4.15.0,x86_64,4,688910336,314
NX_SESSIONID=<redacted@2>
USER=<redacted@0>
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/NX/lib:
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=<redacted@3>
NX_MONITOR_OPTIONS=/home/<redacted@0>/.nx/<redacted@1>/options
USERNAME=<redacted@0>
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
NXDIR=/usr/NX
PWD=/home/<redacted@0>
NX_CONFIG=/home/<redacted@0>/.nx
LANG=
NX_SYSTEM=/usr/NX
SHLVL=0
HOME=/home/<redacted@0>
SystemRoot=
LOGNAME=<redacted@0>
NX_GROUP=<redacted@0>
NX_SESSION=/home/<redacted@0>/.nx/<redacted@1>
NX_USER=<redacted@0>
NX_HOME=/home/<redacted@0>/.nx
DISPLAY=:0
NX_ROOT=/home/<redacted@0>/.nx
XAUTHORITY=/home/<redacted@0>/.nx/<redacted@1>/authority

[kroy]

Are you sure that you installed there 64-bit NoMachine version? Such problems could shows if 32-bit NoMachine is installed on 64-bit system. If it’s the case – uninstall completely current version and install correct one.

[MadMartian]

Seems you may be onto something…

[jonathan@Hoth] /usr/NX/bin
13:58:46 > file nxclient.bin
nxclient.bin: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-, for GNU/Linux 2.4.1, stripped

I’m going to see if I can reinstall this using the 64-bit version.

[MadMartian]

I’ve attached a short video (with microphone audio on to demonstrate mouse clicking) of the behavior for some context.

Attachments:

1. nomachine-no-clicky.mp4

[kroy]

We have not encountered such a problem on the same system OS and KDE Plasma version. Did you uninstall 32-bit NoMachine and remove /usr/NX directory? If not please try remove and install 64-bit version again.

If problem still appears please look for above mentioned logs.

[MadMartian]

Now it is working, but there was only two things that have changed and I do these often enough anyway, so I was quite surprised to find that the context menu has started to work again.

1. I rebooted
2. I killed plasmashell and restarted it

The other thing I notice is that the mouse cursor changes from my large red GNOME cursor to some small black cursor I have not seen before when the context menu activates.  It never did this when the context menu failed to present before.  I suspect this may be a conflict between GNOME and KDE because there are some GNOME processes running on my machine as well (Evolution Mail for one).

I expect this will occur again, but this provides some additional context for troubleshooting.  Since my reboot was relatively recent I imagine some process that is not presently running on my computer could have been causing this issue before.

[Author]

Posts