A couple of weeks ago, when I tried switching to the Contacts tab of Evolution, the entire application froze. Well, that sometimes happens with Evolution – so I simply called killev, also took care all its sub-processes were terminated, and restarted it. Same thing still: As soon as I want to switch to contacts, Evolution freezes – and killev reports No response from Evolution -- killing the process.
Now I thought this might be due to several library and kernel updates without reboot, there might be some mismatch – and the "Windows repair method" would fix it. Having finished the other open tasks, today I finally rebooted the machine. To my surprise, this did not fix the issue – behaviour is still the same: as soon as I try to access contacts, Evolution freezes.
System: Ubuntu 12.04 (and no, updating to 14.04 or 16.04 is not an option for this machine)
Evolution: 3.4.2-1ubuntu3.1~stracciatellappa+precise1 (same version for -common, dataserver and plugins); evolution-webcal: 2.32.0-2ubuntu2.1~stracciatellappa+precise1; evolution-indicator: 0.2.20-0ubuntu7
In my ~/.xsession-errors I see a couple of warnings related to Evolution:
(evolution:4096): LIBDBUSMENU-GLIB-WARNING **: Trying to remove a child that doesn't believe we're it's parent.
(evolution:4096): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: cannot register existing type `EABContactDisplay'
Pushing the "Submit" button on my question, I just wondered about another application: About the time this issue started, I've installed
syncevolutionto get my ownCloud contacts/calendars synced (the build-in WebDAV sync in Evolution is a bit itchy). Never found the time to configure it, though – so just to be on the save side, I ran anapt-get remove --purgeon its 4 packages (syncevolution*). Should have thought about that earlier: issue solved!Obviously there are conflicts between those packages (syncevolution 1.2.2-1 and above mentioned Evolution packages), so removing syncevolution resolves the conflict.