gnome-terminal is not working

[lightoml@…]

I installed gnome-termianl and ran it. But I have below error message.

Could you solve the problem?

Thanks!

Error constructing proxy for org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.Terminal: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ChildExited: Process org.gnome.Terminal exited with status 8

[lightoml@…]

Is there any news on it?

[lightoml@…]

Is someone working on it?

[lightoml@…]

Could anyone tell me what is the status on it?

Thanks!

[dbevans (David B. Evans)]

Yes, it is still not working even after upgrading to GNOME 3.16. And I have been working on it (as time permits) but no final solution as yet.

The problem seems to be that when gnome-terminal starts up, it tries to get dbus to launch the org.gnome.Terminal service which should start /opt/local/libexec/gnome-terminal-server. This service (server) is the thing that starts one or more Terminal instances and keeps track of them.

With version 3.16.1, I realized that there were two problem going on.

First, attempts to launch gnome-terminal-server by hand failed because it's code to increase RLIMIT_NOFILE (max number of files it can open) is flawed. It ends up trying to set this limit to infinity, something that traditionally is allowed but OS X does not. Instead one should set it to MAX_OPEN. This is now fixed and the server starts up and runs until it times out waiting for a client request.

However, when gnome-terminal tries to start the service using dbus, the launch fails with error code 8 (format error) which immediately kills the launched process and the server never really gets started. On the surface, the messages to and from dbus look correct and the point of failure (where the error occurs) seems to be in the dbus code itself.

So that's where I'm working right now. I'm not a dbus guru by any means so if anyone has any ideas on what the problem is they would be gratefully accepted.

Now that 3.16.1 is out, I am working on upgrading to 3.16.2 and will continue debugging there.

[lightoml@…]

Thanks a lot for your answer. I'm looking forward to hearing from a good news.

[DrDaveD]

Cc Me!

[DrDaveD]

Any more progress on this? I really miss gnome-terminal.

I got gnome-terminal-server started by hand as suggested by some others, after setting LC_ALL and LANG=en_US.UTF-8, but gnome-terminal still gets this error.

[dbevans (David B. Evans)]

This is proving to be a hard nut to crack. Since last report, I've fixed one problem with gnome-terminal itself and recently another causing vte to crash. Still haven't been able to diagnose the main problem -- terminal server quietly dies after spawning from the dbus interface. Code in gnome-terminal has changed so that the work around of manually starting the terminal server no longer works as you have mentioned. I keep hoping that the problem will get fixed upstream but no luck as yet.

Any ideas or epiphanies welcome.

[lightoml@…]

Is there any progress on it? The gnome-terminal is still not working.

[DrDaveD]

I am still getting the same error when attempting to port install gnome-terminal, all these years later. In the meanwhile I had been using fink's gnome-terminal as a workaround, but now on 10.15 Catalina that's not working anymore either so I appear to be out of luck. brew has not yet built gnome-terminal as far as I can tell.

[leonpano2006]

for me also not working
macOS terminal fucked up colors (ex btop++)
so I am finding alternatives and I am used to gnome-terminal
I am on macOS 12.3.1

[DrDaveD]

I switched to ITerm2.