5

Background

I run Ubuntu Gnome 15.10. Almost every day there is a crash (due to some segfault) in gom-media-server-miner. So I looked up gom-media-server-miner and found gnome-online-miners which is described as follows:

GNOME Online Miners provides a set of crawlers that go through your online content and index them locally in Tracker. It has miners for Facebook, Flickr, Google, ownCloud and SkyDrive.

Question

Can I disable the gnome-online-miners altogether? I don't want the feature.

What I tried so far

I tried sudo apt-get remove gnome-online-miners and then it insisted on also removing ubuntu-gnome-desktop which sounds like something I want to keep.

$ sudo apt-get remove gnome-online-miners 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  gnome-documents gnome-online-miners gnome-photos ubuntu-gnome-desktop
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 4 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 6 052 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
rasmuse
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    Quick rant: I would rather not have some process try to crawl through something I don't want crawled. This is one of the reasons I am using Linux in the first place. So in a sense I am happy about the segfaults leading to crashes so I found out about the existence of this. – rasmuse Jan 18 '16 at 16:15
  • How did you disable these without removing useful programs? – Gavin Jan 20 '17 at 21:55

3 Answers3

2

I've encountered repeated SEGFAULTs with this package, and used this:

sudo dpkg --force-depends -r gnome-online-miners

This command removes only the package and forces dpkg to treat any dependency errors as warnings.

I'm puzzled that this can't be done with apt/apt-get given that this package is Priority: optional.

gnome-photos, etc., still seem to work.

Nick Breen
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  • Thanks for that! I did not know about --force-depends before, so I learned more than how to solve this particular problem. – rasmuse Jun 05 '17 at 07:18
  • When I run sudo apt upgrade I still get an error. It then suggests I should run sudo apt install -f, which obviously fixes this error by reinstalling gnome-online-miners. Is it possible to just not execute this package, but keep it installed anyway? Or any other workaround... – Jan M. Jun 26 '17 at 08:43
  • Using 16.04 with gnome-shell – Jan M. Jun 26 '17 at 09:04
1

You can remove package by following @tomas response. But you will still get an error each time you use sudo apt-get upgrade and sudo apt-get install.

gnome-photos and gnome-documents have a dependency to gnome-online-miners, even if they don't need it. A temporary hack that I found is :

  • edit /var/lib/dpkg/status
  • find the entry for gnome-photos and gnome-documents
  • Remove gnome-online-miners from the field Depends:

You will need to apply this change each time gnome-photos and gnome-documents are updated.

pBabin
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-1

Could you just change the permissions on gnome-online-miners to make it non-executable? Or simply remove it from /usr/bin or wherever it is?

John Allard
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