I keep getting, since several days, "System program problem detected" error message:
I always clicked on Report problem button but nothing happens.
I also run update and upgrade everyday.
What causes this ? How to get rid of it ?
Ubuntu – System program problem detected
18.04
Related Solutions
Thanks to Terrance comment in my original post, I managed to fix it. The problem was that gb.archive.ubuntu.com was not accessible.
It is configured here (the drop down saying Server for United Kingdom):
It would not allow me to change it to be the Main server. Even running the update-manager as root so I had to do it manually in the /etc/apt/sources.list file.
Once replacing all the occurrences of http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com by http://archive.ubuntu.com in /etc/apt/sources.list the update manager is now set to the Main server download source:
After that, the update goes on with no issues.
The best advice would be find the problem and fix it,
Without determining the problem, you should be able to disable the popup, (but you would be better off finding th source of the "problem")
vim /etc/default/apport
# set this to 0 to disable apport, or to 1 to enable it # you can temporarily override this with # sudo service apport start force_start=1 enabled=1 # <-- Set this to 0
Or sudo systemctl stop apport.service to stop it (also could disable).
If you do want to try and find out what is causing the issue, you can insepect the logs, what I find useful and has helped me track down most errors:
Look for any service files that aren't starting correclty
systemctl --failed
Look through the journal of the current boot for any error messages
journalctl -p 3 -b
Best Answer
See the crash report that is dumped on your disk. The directory you want is
/var/crash/and it will contain several files pointing you to the package it is about and what the crash is.This directory is described as:
Ubuntu releases use this (optional) directory to dump crashes and the package that does that is called apport (and whoopsie). The link has a detailed description and also has a PDF that describes the crash report data format.
If you want really detailed reports on a crash install GDB: The GNU Project Debugger with
sudo apt-get install gdb.Depends on what you call "get rid". The ideal fix would be to check what is inside the reports, and try and find a fix for it. If the package it is about is unneeded or benign you could also purge it. Most times it is a core functionality though.
If you can not understand those crash reports most times you can google the error notice (there will always be one in there). Or drop a message in chat. Generally crashes are off topic on AU as those are bugs and would need to be reported (through this service ;) ).
You can pick any of these to remove the crash report up to actually removing the package (would be rather ironic if the error comes from apport itself):
sudo rm /var/crash/*will delete old crashes and stop informing you about them until some package crashes again.You can stop the service with
sudo systemctl disable apport(and enable it again withsudo systemctl enable apport)If you do not want to see crash reports you can disable it by doing
sudo vim /etc/default/apportand changingenabled=1toenabled=0. (orsudo nano /etc/default/apport). Editing it in reverse will enable it again.You can delete the service with
sudo apt purge apport(and install it again withsudo apt install apport)And there is also a desktop method (option "problem reporting":
how to read and use crash reports? has some interesting answers. It has an example crash report and a method to retrace crashes.