I was startled to come home and find that Evolution had crashed sometime during the day. And even more so when it wouldn’t launch again. I was having an issue with the RSS plugin on one of my 8.04 Hardy computers and things needed fixing.

Running from a terminal window produced the following:

adam@aegis:~$ evolution
evolution-shell-Message: Killing old version of evolution-data-server…
RSS Plugin enabled
RSS Plugin enabled
Reading RSS articles…
feed
Segmentation fault

Checking the dmesg | tail showed the following evolution related segfault messages:

[  147.597558] evolution[6529]: segfault at 8 rip 7f175f8b9a90 rsp 7fff7d916740 error 4

….

[  493.311166] evolution[6868]: segfault at 8 rip 7f60eb4bfa90 rsp 7fff0951d510 error 4
[  626.983159] evolution[6984]: segfault at 8 rip 7f0466686a90 rsp 7fff846e26d0 error 4

Running it with all of the plugins disabled would produce:

adam@aegis:~$ evolution –disable-eplugin
evolution-shell-Message: Killing old version of evolution-data-server…

** (evolution:6768): CRITICAL **: factory: assertion `upgrade == 2′ failed

(evolution:6768): evolution-shell-WARNING **: Cannot activate OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_RSS:2.22 — Factory `OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_RSS_Factory:2.22′ returned NIL for `OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_RSS:2.22′

** (evolution:6768): CRITICAL **: factory: assertion `upgrade == 2′ failed

(evolution:6768): evolution-shell-WARNING **: Cannot activate OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_RSS:2.22 — Factory `OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_RSS_Factory:2.22′ returned NIL for `OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_RSS:2.22′

** (evolution:6768): CRITICAL **: factory: assertion `upgrade == 2′ failed

(evolution:6768): evolution-shell-WARNING **: Cannot activate OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_RSS:2.22 — Factory `OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_RSS_Factory:2.22′ returned NIL for `OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_RSS:2.22′

However, with the plugins disabled, Evolution would run on its own with no issue. Considering the relationship of the segmentation fault and the WARNINGs with RSS feeds, I felt the problem was with the RSS plugin. Removing the plugin was simple enough.

sudo apt-get purge evolution-rss

Now Evolution would start as designed. The RSS feeds were still stored but I couldn’t update any of them. After a little Googling, I came across this Ubuntu Forums post suggesting that Hardy users grab an updated evolution-rss package from Debian.

Since Debian 5.0 Lenny has just gone stable, it has the latest package. After downloading the deb package for evolution-rss 0.1.0-2 to the desktop, closing Evolution, double-clicking on the deb file and choosing Install Package, I had a workable RSS plugin for Evolution again.

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