In 12.10 64bit with Gnome I have the same error message. It starts happening after a few days uptime and affects all applications started from the menus.
It is still possible to run the applications from the command line. top - 09:58:33 up 3 days, 19:18, 3 users, load average: 0.16, 0.19, 0.15 Tasks: 150 total, 2 running, 148 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie %Cpu0 : 0.7 us, 0.0 sy, 0.0 ni, 97.6 id, 1.7 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st %Cpu1 : 0.3 us, 0.0 sy, 0.0 ni, 98.6 id, 1.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st KiB Mem: 3750092 total, 3563064 used, 187028 free, 16716 buffers KiB Swap: 3888124 total, 1811224 used, 2076900 free, 337028 cached -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to file-roller in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/240754 Title: Failed to fork (Cannot allocate memory) Status in “file-roller” package in Ubuntu: Invalid Bug description: Binary package hint: file-roller Ubuntu Hardy Herron, last updated 16th of June Please look at this bug and tell me first if file-roller is behaving correctly. If it's not then this is a bug against file-roller. If file-roller is working as expected then this is a usability bug. What I did: I want to make a copy of /home/$user so I can reinsert some of the files after reformatting the HDD on this laptop. So I went to /home and with the mouse over my home directory I right clicked and from the context menu I chose 'Create Archive...' and chose to make a .tar.gz archive on my desktop. A bit of a circular argument I know, but that's what I did. What happened: For a long time file-roller's progress dialog showed that it was building a file list. This took for ever (about 5 minutes for a 350MB home dir) and eventually I got the error message: An error occurred while adding files to the archive. Failed to fork (Cannot allocate memory) I thought, 'Oh that's probably because I kept using Firefox so it kept creating extra files. So I'll try again'. I tried again and left the machine alone - but got the same message. What I expect to happen: 1. I expected it to work by building a file list (excluding itself - because that file doesn't exist yet) and then creating the archive with each file in the state it is when it gets touched. 2. If it didn't work, I expected it to fail early and explain why things went wrong. 'Failed to fork' and 'Cannot allocate memory' don't tell me why it didn't work - so I can't find a solution. 3. If the kind of circular reference I've created is inherently impossible - then it should have failed early, see above. I'll open a question if I can't solve this one on my own - so please don't post solutions to my little problem. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file-roller/+bug/240754/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
