Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

Turning off Apport crash reporting on Ubuntu

6th April 2015

Last week, I kept getting a multitude of messages from Ubuntu’s crash reporting tool, Apport. So many would appear at once on reaching the desktop session during system start-up that I actually downloaded an installation ISO disk image with the intention of performing a fresh installation to rid myself of the problem. In the end, it never came to that because another remedy produced the result that I needed.

Emptying /etc/crash was a start but it did not do what I needed and I disabled Apport altogether. This meant editing its configuration file, which is named apport and is found in /etc/default/. The following command should open it up in Gedit on supplying your password:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/apport

With the file opened, look for the line with enabled=1 and change this to enabled=0. Once that is done, restart Apport as follows:

sudo restart apport

This will need your account password to be supplied before it will act and any messages should appear thereafter. Of course, I would not have done this if there was a real system problem but my Ubuntu GNOME installation was and is working smoothly so it is the remedy that I needed. The idea behind the tool is that Ubuntu developers get information on any application crashes but I find that it directs me to the Ubuntu Launchpad bug reporting website and that requires a user name and password for the information to be processed. For some reason, that is enough to stall me and I wonder if there could be a way of getting developers what they need without adding that extra manual step. Then, more information gets supplied and we get a more stable operating system in return.

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