Pencil project software crashing on launch

Ask Fedora
1

Hi all, its been a while, Ive been using fedora up to now with very little issues, I’m utilising the pencil project software for part of my university studies, installed it no problem but on launch it opens a greyed out launch window then crashes.

The following is the terminal output.

[daniel@fedora ~]$ pencil
Hardware acceleration disabled for Linux.
Fontconfig warning: "/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/05-reset-dirs-sample.conf", line 6: unknown element "reset-dirs"
Background web-printer started.
Shortcut main service started.
Shortcut: Super+F12 registered
[3238:0921/213127.883128:FATAL:gpu_data_manager_impl_private.cc(894)] The display compositor is frequently crashing. Goodbye.
Trace/breakpoint trap (core dumped)

The annoying thing is open up LMDE in boxes and it runs straight away no problems.
So not sure what the problem is or how to rectify it, any suggestions or advice welcome.

Thank you in advance.

2

That error & crash may be related to the hardware acceleration disabled warning. What do you have for GPU and what driver is in use?

The next warning/error is related to the config file with reset-dirs.

3

Hi Jeff appreciate the reply.
I assumed it would be, hence trying it in a VM.

The machine is a Lenovo t450 without dedicated gpu, lspci -k gives the following:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 5500 (rev 09)
	Subsystem: Lenovo Device 5034
	Kernel driver in use: i915
	Kernel modules: i915
4

I seem to recall that there are some newer intel GPUs that are not properly supported by some of the i915 drivers and that for those a newer version of the driver may be needed. A search for the i915 driver and for the device chipset which may be visible near the end of each line in the form of [xxxx:xxxx] when you run lspci -nn should give you some pointers in that regard.

5

I had a look into the driver, it is the only driver available for intel, its an older cpu so i cant see the problem being on that front.

I’ve since live booted Ubuntu,LMDE and Fedora, all use the same i915 driver and the gpu is seen as the same across all the distros, all work except Fedora so a little stumped.

6

The problem still persists once the distro of choice has been installed, works from live usb which is odd.

I’ve since seen the devs discussion and its a bug/problem with the current version of the software so not limited to fedora as I’ve now found out.

There is a work around that needs implementing manually.